Upgrades

I've been more silent as of late than usual. This is because I've been spending a lot of my free time upgrading my network infrastructure in anticipation of a major Internet upgrade. Most of this involved backend work that you readers won't notice. Suffice to say that I made major edits to my Ansible playbooks and redid several parts of my home network.

A bit more than five years ago my wife and I moved to this house located in the rural Wisconsin. We loved everything about the property except for one thing: the only Internet option was DSL. I had DSL when I was in college and wasn't looking forward to going back to it after having enjoyed cable Internet for a decade, but the property was good enough that I was willing to make the sacrifice. One upside is the DSL was decent at 20 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up. I was also able to get a static IP address so I could continue self-hosting my services.

Eventually Starlink became available in my area so I signed up. It was a significant upgrade. I regularly got 200 Mbps down and between 15 and 20 Mbps up. The two downsides were that my Starlink connection went offline during severe storms and I couldn't get a static IP address. Therefore, I kept the DSL so I had a backup when the weather was bad and could continue hosting my services. My home network had two gateways and each client was assigned the appropriate gateway from my DHCP servers. My self-hosted services used the DSL gateway and everything else used the Starlink gateway unless there was severe weather. When there was severe weather, I ran an Ansible script that rebuilt my DHCP servers' configurations to assign every client the DSL gateway. Each client would start using the DSL connection when their DHCP lease expired and renewed (I use short leases for this reason). I admit it wasn't the most elegant solution, but it was good enough for how rarely the Starlink connection went offline.

When I first bought this house, the DLS was provided by CenturyLink. CenturyLink are a shower of bastards. Whenever the DSL went offline, I had to suffer through a minimum of five phone transfers to get to a tech that could actually fix the issue. Eventually CenturyLink sold its DSL business to Brightspeed. Brightspeed somehow managed to be worse.

About a year ago a contractor buried fiber down my road. I expected to receive some notice that an ISP would be providing fiber service in my area but no such notice ever arrived. I searched high and low for the ISP that owned the fiber but found none. A few months ago Brightspeed announced that my static IP address would change. My history with Brightspeed told me that the changeover wouldn't go well so I searched for the owner of the buried fiber once again. This time I found the ISP, which is Lakeland Communications. I gave them a call and they confirmed that they provided fiber to my area. The only downside to me was the cost of installing the fiber from the road to my house. My house is far from the road so the cost of connecting my house to the fiber wasn't cheap (it was reasonable though considering the distance).

I was able to push off Brightspeed's static IP address assignment, which turned out to be a blessing. To say the static IP address change went poorly would be an understatement. They managed to fuck it up completely. I had no Internet connectivity after the change. I spent a total of two hours on the phone with their technical support, all of whom are worthless, to no avail. Fortunately, Lakeland was scheduled to complete the fiber installation two days after that so I was only without my self-hosted services for about 48 hours.

Lakeland Communications proved to be competent and easygoing. Because I self-host services including e-mail, I expected to need to sign up for a business account (what I've always had to do with other ISPs), but was told that I could self-host from a residential connection without any issue. They were also more than happy to let me use my router instead of theirs, which made reconfiguration my network as easy as changing the static IP address in my UniFi Network Controller. The speeds are good enough that I have to upgrade my router since I'm running an old Ubiquiti Security Gateway 3P and my Wi-Fi access points.

Now when you access this site, it should download significantly faster. I can finally make full use of a number of my self-hosted services too. It's nice to have these capabilities again after five years of DSL restricting me to making sparse use of my services when I'm not home.