@imark77 The 0.0.7 / 0.04 speeds are from really bad T-Mobile signal. It is not roaming. I live on a hill, and that's the speeds I get in my home office when the phone is on 4G LTE. Sometimes it switches to 5G, and the download speed goes way up, but the upload speed remains the same. This morning it wasn't getting any data signal at all for several minutes, just a few bars, presumably GSM only. Voice calls over cell tend to have frequent periods of >1s silence. This weak T-mobile signal was unfortunately the best cell signal I could get in this room, and in most rooms, between the major 3 carriers for the 14 years I have been here. 3 years ago I tried a Verizon 5G SIM with my phone. Speedtest got 0.001 Mbps down / 0.000 up. Ie. just 1kbps ... It was a free trial and I obviously cancelled.
Basically, only Wifi calling works for calls, or wired VoIP. I had Ooma before, and switched to voip.ms a few weeks ago using a Grandview HT802 analog telephone adapter. The Panasonic DECT 6.0 analog phone with the maximum 6 handsets covers my entire property inside and out, something that Wifi cannot do even with 6 APs, and that the cell carriers couldn't do either, but that may have changed recently with the new Verizon towers.
As far as the price, not sure where you got $600/month. I clearly mentioned Verizon was charging $50/month, which is $600/year. I still think it's too much for a backup that's seldom used. I would prefer a less expensive plan without unlimited data. Maybe a plan with only 1GB of data included, and the ability to pay extra by the GB, as needed.
I am not sure how Comcast business is going to be any better than Comcast residential service (Xfinity) which I have at the moment. When Comcast does their so-called "scheduled maintenance", the cable modem loses sync. Unless they are running a separate cable on which they aren't doing this maintenance, I don't see how business will it help. It will certainly cost more, though, and I'm trying to minimize costs and ditch Comcast altogether due to both the outages and price increases.
I was paying $80/month for 1200 / 200 service. The speeds were more than good enough, as well as the price. But it went to $150 after the contract ended. I got a new contract, but the best they would do was $110, even though new customers pay $90 for the same service. For the first time in 20 years with Comcast, they just wouldn't match new customer price. The fact that speeds drop to 0 / 0 during all the outages is much more problematic though. I'm tired of having to go outside late at night to make a call and request a bill credit. I would like to trade some speed for more reliability, preferably without contract, which means without Comcast, and at lower cost than the $110 I'm paying right now.
I believe a 5G smartphone could be used as a WAN with pfSense, either through USB tethering, Wifi hotspot, or even Ethernet tethering that I read about. All those should do the job, but they have one thing in common - they probably will only work for outbound connections due to the phone acting as a router, and performing NAT. That covers most of the use cases, which are principally outbound traffic late at night when streaming and getting a Comcast outage. I would like to also cover inbound traffic for remote access to my home, but this will require a public IP address from the carrier, either IPv4 or IPv6, and I'm not sure it's possible to get one with a SIM. Verizon 5G Home Internet does hand out public IPs, but requires the $50/month subscription. I need a device that will take a physical SIM to use a US Mobile Warp 5G shared data plan that uses the Verizon cell network. Fedex just delivered such a SIM a few minutes ago. I'm going to port my cell phone line from GSM 5G (T-Mobile) to Warp 5G (Verizon) while staying with the same MVNO, US Mobile. Hopefully, my signal issues on the phone will finally be history. And I will be able to see what kind of IPs the phone gets, once the port is done. It would great if one of the IPs was public.