InvisaGig Support

In the world of cellular data and device connections to the world at large, there is a bit of a miscommunication when it comes to IP Passthrough and what that means for cellular internet users.

In short, you don’t get an IP address that you can use on the general internet. There is NO IP to PASSTHROUGH. Not in practical repeatable controllable cases at least.

In general when it comes to cellular internet connections, whether on a cell phone, tablet, hotspot, or a modem, all customers of these services are being placed on the cell carriers own network to be routed as the cell carrier desires. This means that all of your data traffic, when it leaves your location and travels out into the wild world wide web, it first travels through the cell carriers network (think of this like it goes through your neighbors router immediately after it leaves your house), and then on to other servers around the world eventually making it to the destination that you need to pull information from (web sites, app servers, games, email, etc).

When your data travels through this carrier network, after leaving your location, it is doing so through a network of routers that have their own rules for routing. We call this CGNAT.

The carrier NAT assigns your connection to them an IP address that only the carrier can use, the IP address that you see when you go to a site like whatismyip.com and so forth, is not the same IP address you might see on your InvisaGig as the assigned IP. This IP that the web is saying is your IP is actually the SAME IP that MANY MANY others will also see as THEIR IP address. The carriers do this to conserve IP address use, and we have no control over it.

NOW. You CAN get a static public IP address from the carrier assigned to your SIM card. Different carriers will do this for a monthly fee, Tmobile being the lowest cost option at ~$3 at the time of this writing. This IP address CAN be passed through and IS publicly accessible if the device that your InvisaGig is connected to allows external connections (like SSH or similar remote connection protocols).

You will need to contact your carrier for a static public IP, and make CERTAIN you understand that they also generally assign the IP location permanently. Make sure you know about the choice for the IPs location so that you don’t end up getting all of your traffic routed across the country from you before it can go anywhere.

Understand too that some of these plans, like from Tmobile come with some problems as well, like lowered network priority (slower during peak hours) and sometime restrictions from 5G SA access, or 5G access at all. You will also lose all ability to use IPV6 if that matters to you.

NOTE: Tmobile does offer a static IPV6 address option as well, but from what we have seen, no one at Tmobile has any idea how to do it or how it works on their end. I would opt to avoid it for now.