My revenge on slow Internet

When I lived with my parents in the South of France 15 years ago, I lived a tumultous adolescence. One thing I remember is us living at the very end of a copper line, bringing ADSL at a whopping 800ko/s.

I became proficient in computers around that age too, and it taught me patience (put someone in a room with very slow internet and you’ll see their true nature). Any download over 1Go made me anxious. If it failed halfway and was not a torrent, that was easily a few hours wasted. Torrents became the default for many things for that reason…

Anyway, lately I’ve decided to upgrade my parent’s house internet connection and the entire networking stack.

WAN: Starlink & 5G

For my parents, fiber or any landline is not an option because of the remote location of the house. Starlink was the first WAN upgrade we installed, two years ago and it was incredible. My mom discovered video calls(!).

5G is interesting here. I could add a 5G WAN connection thanks to these factors:

• A 5G tower in direct line of sight with one of the roofs (distance of less than 2km) operating the n78 band and LTE for aggregation. In France we have a public API with this data.
• A second-hand ZTE MC889 modem with an unlocked firmware (jackpot) allowing a strong directional lock on the tower at the right frequencies, configured in bridge mode. Special scripts can help lock the modem on the n78 and LTE bands.

The MC889 provides twice the bandwidth performance of Starlink in throughput and latency, but Starlink is incredibly stable (observing after 3 years of use) with also no cap on data. Both are good enough connections, I’ll have to play with the router WAN policies to make good use of both.

This setup allows 1GBps which is insanely good value for “wireless internet”, compared to the initial setup or even just Starlink.

If you are with Orange/Sosh in France, you can add another SIM card for 5€/month, which could be useful for such setup.

Both are mounted on a pole tied to chimney on one of the roofs, with precise alignment for both. Both Ethernet (PoE) go down the unused chimney back in the house to the network rack.

LAN

Starlink and the MC889 are connected to a ER707-M2 router. This router allows multiple WAN input including two ports at 2.5Gbps, which can be useful for the MC889 and future-proofing if fiber gets there one day eventually.

It also allows load-balancing and fail-over, useful when you would combine your WAN connection to aggregate the connections (I know it’s not really a full aggregation) or when Starlink is down, 5G takes over etc.

The router is connected to a 24-PoE ports switch. 200 meters of Cat6a cables go from the network rack to every corner of the house, reaching zone switches or WiFi access points. Access points are Deco units, which are very good for the price.

In the network rack I also put a Home Assistant Green and a SLZB-06. This assures the management of smart devices (plugs, some lights, garage door, inverter/batteries, solar installation etc), and tracking of water and power consumption of the house.

Home Assistant is extremely powerful here. In addition to the things it does and the Zigbee network and thanks to this ZTE integration and the Starlink one, it can track the data consumption from the MC889 and Starlink, that can be then used in useful automation and scripts.

I’ll probably detail the Home Assistant setup in another article at some point. I also run one in my Paris apartment, it’s just so convenient. I’ve rarely found so much value in opensource software than with Home Assistant.

There is also an Intel NUC i5-1145G7 that manages the DNS (Adguard Home), a Nextcloud instance, a VPN, the Omada controller and various docker stuff to manage the network instead of using the ER707 interface. I’ll probably add a paperless-ngx instance to help my parents with their pre-internet docs.

Overall, I’m very happy for my parents with how things are set up now and the teenager I was would be happy too.