Wednesday, February 22, 2023

On having a fancy house LAN and wet string WAN.

I'm finding it increasingly frustrating that I have a nice and shiny Unifi home network with lots of cat 6 in the walls, a rack in the attic, redundant servers etc but a DSL connection to a cabinet 500m away (because you're always connected towards the exchange even if there's a nearer cabinet on the other side of you) via what seems to be rapidly corroding copper installed in the early 80s.

The area I'm in is theoretically covered by Siro and many neighbours have it but there seem to be right of way issues near us and so they weren't able to run it to closer than 100m from my house. I tried to get wireless but couldn't get decent bandwidth to the highpoint. Mobile isn't useful as it's very unreliable here (though possibly higher bandwidth than my DSL). Mostly I dislike it because of the high latency and the fact that it's hard to get an affordable 5G modem that can be used in bridge mode (apparently the Vodafone subsidised one can't be).

In theory I should be able to get NBI to install fibre. My neighbour over the back wall has it. But in an excitingly burst of bureaucracy, they say they can't provide it to me because Eir say they can give me 30Mbps (they can't) and they're not allowed by the EU to compete with any provider that can meet that bar. So I'm in the exciting process of persuading Eir to admit they can't provide the bandwidth I am entitled to so that I can get ComReg (or Eir? who knows?) to tell NBI that in fact they can provide fibre to me. I'm wondering if I should just talk to my neighbour about paying for her broadband and sharing it.

I would absolutely throw money at this problem if I knew where to throw it. I have a friend who is paying for a leased line to deal with a similar issue but the opex for that is well outside my range. It's all very frustrating as I check the log on the modem again and see it has had to renegotiate the DSL.

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