EDIT: I meant QSV Gen 7, which would be intel Gen 11. Kaby Lake and up can still handle HEVC in hardware but they have to use software as well for 4K.
worth mentioning that any intel cpu with an iGPU from generation 7 (kaby lake) and up can handle 4k hevc transcode in hardware. i just upgraded my plex box to an i7 8700K and it works quite well. an old office workstation with like a 9th or 11th gen intel cpu would probably rip through transcodes.
I would probably still brew decaf coffee to go with them for the taste and smell.
Also don't hack me plz
We're having a pretty nasty thunderstorm right now and it barely misses a beat. I swear I'm not a musk shill lol, I just remember 3G hotspots and how much worse this would have been. 
Unfortunately, for me the spot where the signal is strong is ~250 feet up on top of a mountain. We had a cell booster that worked great on 3G but I'm not real keen on spending another $150 on a new repeater that may or may not pick up a signal from our roof. Another fun aspect of being out in the country is that I'm living in a converted pole barn which has a metal "skin" with double layer mylar foil/foam insulation that makes it quite difficult for signals to get inside. There's no mesh so it's not a full Faraday cage but it creates a lot of attenuation.
I really miss t-mob from living in northern virginia. I'm up in the Appalachian mountains tucked between two peaks. There was a plan at one time to utilize the old 800mhz band for some sort of municipal internet (since 800mhz can either punch through the rock or "ride" along the earth, been too long since RF school to remember). But as far as I know nothing ever came of it.
The AT&T hotspot is actually data capped, higher ping, and quite slow since we only have HSPA+ (4G) way out here. We used a hotspot while we were on the wait list for Starlink and just knowing there was a data cap made it pretty unpleasant to use. I should have specified that in the original post.
aesthetics, i would guess. everyone has different tastes.
Unfortunately we only get AT&T and maybe a whiff of T-Mobile once in a blue moon. Gotta go a few miles into town to get reliable service, especially if you want 5G. Thanks though.
I'm super jealous. I'm out here in Western Maryland and I'd be happy to see us get plain old telephone service.
I'm wondering if it's something with the mobile plan? I only have the fixed address plan and I've never seen a data cap. Hell, I run my homelab off of it with Plex and shit. They seem to be pretty chill but I'm do make sure to throttle my upload to be polite.
Thank goodness, now I can defend my home against tyranny and people who look different than me with a pseudo-machine gun, just the way the Founding Fathers intended! (/s just in case)