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Everybody wants faster internet, but sometimes it's just not worth the extra cost. But in this video, I’m going to tell you how you can get high-speed internet not just cheaply, but actually completely free, and yes, completely legally. In fact, the US and European governments both recently passed laws requiring internet companies to offer very fast internet, in some casesgigabit, completely free in certain circumstances. So don’t worry I’ll explain everything, including why this is allowed, and how you can take advantage of it with stuff you already have in your house, it only takes a couple of minutes.
Before we jump in, I have to do my usual plug real quick. First of all, if you haven’t seen my world-famous Instagram account, I have the most hilarious world-renown tech memes on there, you’ll probably have a heart attack from laughing so hard from looking at it, so be sure to check that out, it’s just @ThioJoe over on Instagram. And also be sure to subscribe here on youtube and enable notifications with the bell, or else the YouTube algorithm probably won't tell you when I upload even if you are subscribed. But anyway, with all that out of the way, let’s get started.
So to begin, I’ll go over why this is all possible, and explain how you can tell what potential free internet speed you might get. It turns out, with a new trade deal between the USA and European Union, both countries have decided that as of January 1st, 2020, all internet service providers must offer a minimum internet speed to all citizens via new 5G technology, with even US President Donald Trump tweeting that the USA should roll out free 6G as soon as possible.
The law is called the “Fair Access KilobyteEquity” law, or yes, the funny acronym “FAKE” for short. This new service is very similar to how network television channels are offered over the air for free to receive if you just have an antenna. And governments have said that these internet companies must offer a free tier of speed, that is equal to at least one half of their lowest-paid 5G internet tier. But here’s the kicker. 5G is extremely fast. In fact, because of the way the technology works, it has a minimum speed, usually around 100 Mbps. Meaning you’re guaranteed to get this speed no matter what, yes for free.
I’ll keep this extremely simple and easy to understand, but if you are interested in the reason this minimum exists, there some interesting physics behind it. You see, 5G relies on a property of electromagnetism called dielectric permeability, aka how easily a radio signal can penetrate objects, including walls. Each broadcast also has a so-called “transmission power to bandwidth ratio”, which essentially means that as you raise or lower the broadcast power of a transmission, you not only raise and lower the maximum bandwidth and speed, but you also change the minimum bandwidth and speed by the same amount… it’s a range.
You can see it in this simple graph measured with a coaxial wavemeter, where the Digi-lateral coefficient is directly proportional to the material's diffusion factor, NOT the Scheimpflug coefficient like you probably assumed. But you don’t have to know all that it’snot really important, it’s more of just a fun fact. Anyway, my point is that for some internet providers, because they exclusively offer extremely high speeds, such as 2-gigabit or more minimum, that means the free tier will still be as much as 1 gigabit potentially.
So basically 5G is much faster, and thanks to the laws of physics, it helps take even better advantage of this new law. Obviously, the internet companies are not advertising this at all, and want to keep this as secret as possible, but not on my watch. So enough of the science, let’s go over exactly what you’ll need and how to do this, and then afterward I’ll tell you how you can more easily determine what kind of speed you can expect before doing this, or if it's available in your area. Because while technically ISPs must begin their rollout of the service by January 2020, they are not required to have full coverage until 2023.
Now normally you would have to buy a specially designed antenna by calling up the local internet company and ask for a compatible “FAKE” antenna, named after the law, but this can potentially cost hundreds of dollars, because the law didn’t say anything about offering a free antenna, just the service, and internet companies obviously want to discourage you from using it, so they charge a very high price for them. However, you can make your own antenna at home with some household materials practically for free.
So these are the materials you’ll need. First, some electrical tape and scissors to cut it. Next, a regular plastic drinking cup, or just a mug or something, just as long as it’s not made of glass, but I’ll spare you the scientific reason for that. You’ll also need a smartphone that will be used for calibration, any kind of USB charging cable at least three feet long, along with a charger, and finally a reasonably long ethernet cable. I’ll explain what all this is for as we go along. So let’s got to the table and show you what to do. The first thing we need to do is construct the antenna.
You need to wrap the entire drinking cup with electrical tape, except you don’t want to cover the opening or the bottom. The electrical tape will attenuate the signal and happens to have the perfect dielectric permeability to filter out most other radio signals except the ones we want. You have a lot of leeways when doing this, just make sure the entire cup is wrapped with electrical tape like you see I’m doing here. It’s totally fine if the tape overlaps, in fact, it’s probably better if it does a little bit so you know there are no gaps. And only one layer is all you need, don’t bother adding any more than necessary because it won’t make a difference. After the cup is all covered like this, the next step is to receive the over-air signal. For this, we need to insert the ethernet cable into the cup, and sort of coil it around inside like this. Each coil of the wire should be on top of the previous one just like a spring.
You’ll need it to coil at least 3 times, but really 4 or 5 will yield the best results, especially if you expect to access very high speeds. If you have trouble getting it to look right, it’s OK to use some small pieces of electrical tape to secure the cable in place in a few spots to make sure it coils correctly. It doesn’t really matter if the spacing between each coil is consistent, but you do need to make sure none of the coils crosses over another. You’ll also want to make sure you use along enough ethernet cable, because the other end will plug into the computer, and you'll want to have enough slack. Alright, now that we have the antenna fully constructed, next we need to calibrate the antenna to the correct internet service provider.
For this step, we’ll need your smartphone, the USB cable, and the charger. You see, each internet company broadcasts on a slightly different 5G frequency, with a slightly different longitudinal polarity for each. To ensure the antenna will be able to receive this frequency, we need to sort of train it first but don’t worry, it’s very easy. What you do is plug your phone into any wall outlet using the charger and USB cable, and make sure it’s charging. It’s OK if it’s already fully charged, that won’t make a difference as long as power is at least able to flow from the phone to the charger. Then, get the antenna-cup device we just created, and stick as much of the charging cable into the cup as you can, within reason of course. You don’t have to be very neat about it, it can be tangled and messy, just get as much in there as you can.
And next, we’ll need to create the signal pattern unique to whatever internet service provider, or ISP, you want to use for the free internet, which is a lot simpler than it sounds. We can use the website Speedtest.net to do this, so open that up on your phone hooked up to the antenna. You can either just use the website version of the speed test or the actual standalone app, it doesn’t matter. But here’s the key, the speed test will let you choose which ISP with which you want to conduct the test. Most of the big ISPs in your area should have test servers you can pick. Just be aware, there are also a lot of other companies that offer speed test servers, that are not actually internet providers, so using them won’t work.
Make sure you choose a server from a company you recognize as actually being an internet service provider, which will vary depending on your area. Keep in mind you will be able to redo this later if you want with another company, so it’s not the end of the world if you make a mistake. This also means you can try out different companies and see which will give you the fastest speed. In any case, choose whatever ISP you want, and run the test, making sure it finishes. Then, run the full test four more times, for a total of 5.
Each time the test is run, some residual signal will be conducted through the power cable, and the electromagnetic field will be embedded into the ethernet cable. This process won’t affect the ethernet cable’s performance if you use it for something else later, it only affects it when using it to receive this special 5G signal. After you finish the 5 tests, unfortunately, there's no visual indication to distinguish this cable from any other. Technically you probably only need to run2 or 3 tests, but there’s a small chance that may not be enough, and since you can tell visually, I still recommend 5 tests, which is a 99% chance of success. You may also want to label the cable with a marker so you know this one has been calibrated.
So anyway, at this point the 5G frequency electromagnetic signature is embedded into the ethernet cable, but its polarity is not ‘locked in’ you might say. Without fully stabilizing the polarity of the cable, the effect will wear off in a matter of minutes, and even within that time frame, it will likely be unusable because of competing polarizations along its length. But don’t worry, we have a fix for that too. So for the final step we just need to polarize the ethernet cable. For this I actually forgot, you will need just one more thing, a basic spectra-depolarizer, so just grab an extra one you have lying around your house.
Ideally one with a phase-contrast attachment, but that’s not super necessary, it will just speed up the process a bit. Once you have this device, take the antenna and place it on the polarizer, making sure to reasonably center it, or of course, you might ruin the procedure and need to start all over. It’s hard to do that though so don’t worry, just make sure it’s somewhat centered, and not completely off to the side and touching one of the edges or anything.
Just look at how I have it here and it will be fine. Calibration starts automatically when you turn it on, and then you’ll notice it will begin displaying some various information. As long as it isn’t showing any kind of error message, it should be working. It’s pretty much completely automatic so you don’t have to do anything besides wait. Once it’s started, you can just let it sit there for about an hour, being sure to not move it in the slightest, or else you will have to start over the calibration and wait an hour more past the time you moved it.
You may be wondering what the information on the screen is saying. The only one you need to keep an eye on is the ‘beat error’ which should almost always end up at by the end of the process. In all likelihood though, it will probably start at 0 anyway unless it’s an old cable, and it’s fine if it starts something else, but definitely by the end of the hour, it should be at zero. If not, you might unfortunately need to try another cable. The other information isn’t really important, but basically, these have to do with the 5G radio signature polarized onto the cable.
The “rate” has to do with the actual frequency that it will be receiving on, and the amplitude is the amplitude of the modulated carrier waves. Finally, the parameters are just settings the machine uses to detect the type of calibration required. All of these will be unique to each internet provider, so they will appear different depending on which one you use. After about an hour has passed though, it should be finished. And now, we’re ready to test out what kind of speeds we can get. So get whatever computer you want to use to test out the antenna, and plug it in with the ethernet cable. It should show as a wired connection on the computer. At this point, you’ll know it worked because you'll obviously have internet access, and we can test the speed by going again to speedtest.net, or whatever other internet speed test site you prefer.
This time you can choose any test server, but it might yield a faster result if you choose the same one as before. And now with this all hooked up, it’s the moment of truth… And look, I’m getting extremely fast speeds. Not quite Gigabit, but I mean I’m not complaining, this is a crazy fast result. And it’s completely free too! Now we’re not quite done yet, because I must admit, this is a pretty unusually fast result, so you probably shouldn’t expect anything this fast. But there is a way you can test out which IP's free connection will give you the fastest speed before going through all the stuff we talked about. It’s pretty easy just using a command built-into Windows.
So at the computer in Windows what you cando is open up the command prompt by going to the start menu, typing cmd, and then running. Then you can type in the following command to figure out the different internet tiers available from a specific ISP. You type in “com-test”, followed by the name of the URL of the ISP’s main website, then the parameters “-tiers -5G”. So for example, if the ISP I’m interested in was Google Fiber, the full command would be “com-test google.com -tiers -5G”. It will probably take a second to load the result. This is a standardized command supported by all ISPs to display their different speed tiers.
As you can see, it will list out the different tiered speed offerings by the company. Next to each tier, there will also be a column labeled “5G”, with an entry of either Y or N, for Yes or No, to indicate whether that tier is supported for 5G. To determine what speed you can expect from the free connection, look at the lowest speed tier that has a “yes” in the 5G column, then divide that by 2.
Remember, the company is only required by law to offer 50% of their lowest 5G speed. However, the exception is if the lowest 5Gspeed, divided by two is less than 100 Mbps, because 100 is the minimum, so even if that's the lowest tier, you’ll get the full 100 no matter what. Also notice there may be many tiers, not labelled5G, probably some that are lower than 100 Mbps, but again those don’t count, only the 5G speeds do. Now if you run the command and you get an error message of any kind, probably something like “command not recognized”, it is saying the ISP does not recognize that system command, which means they have not yet rolled out the 5G internet network.
If that’s the case, you’ll just have to try another ISP in your area. If it doesn’t seem to work on any ISP you try, unfortunately, that most likely means you won’t be able to get free internet access just yet in your area because it hasn’t been rolled out yet. But if you do get some results, great! Just go with the internet company that offers the fastest minimum speed. So now you can enjoy your faster internet speed. Be sure to check out my other tech tutorials that are just as useful, including everything from how to get more RAM, to improving phone battery life. I’ll put a link to that playlist right hereto click on. Thanks for watching, and have a good one.