Today I did a live stream with MyEnglishWorld. We were going to talk about a variety of things, especially related to his immigration. We also were going to barbeque. Because… Texas.

He was live streaming from his phone, which was tethered off my phone. Aleks has Mint Mobile on his phone, but he was out of data and was massively throttled. We realized it literally just moments before the stream was supposed to start. A few minutes before, I had noticed I had a really solid 5G UltraWideband connection (4 gigabits!?), so we tethered his phone to my phone and went live.

I had brought along a Verizon LTE hotspot (tech overkill) and ended up tethering my laptop to it for monitoring comments.

All was well.

Until partway through the stream, when I saw some people mention things blurring. I also got a text from my wife saying the stream had frozen. The comments weren’t updating, and suddenly I got disconnected from YouTube on my laptop.

Verizon was having indigestion. At least the local tower appeared to be having a moment. I looked at my phone, and the signal had dropped to 3 bars and 5G (non ultra wideband). A few long moments later, everything was back.

However, it reaffirmed that I need to build the streaming access point for Aleks to mitigate these things. My dilemma had been I wasn’t able to test live streaming from my phone to YouTube as you need at least 50 subscribers. Thanks to a brief mention on-stream, and Aleks putting it in the video description, I ended up with more than 50 subscribers on both of my channels that evening.

Now the work begins.