How to best set up my Rural Internet Connection?

October 3, 2022 9:20 PM

Hi MeFites! I was recently fired from the only local ISP that serves my area (far Northwest of Fort Worth, Texas). I'm 20 months into the wait list for Starlink and am hoping to have it by EOY, but in the meantime, can you help sanity check my dual mobile-hotspot router set up?

I have been spending literally every spare second on this since my fat mouth got us fired from the only ISP that serves the area. I could use Hughes Net or something like that, but they all want a contract, and they all throttle at a certain point. We are reasonably sure we will have Starlink by EOY and just need to be able to work and stream TV for that period of time.

Details:
2 mobile hotspots - one facing west and one facing south - connect via ethernet to:
1 TP Link ER605 Dual WAN switch that connects via ethernet to:
TP Link Mesh - Deco 9 but have a Wifi 6 version coming this week

We have an additional TP Link Wifi 6 router and a Wifi 6 extender we can use as needed. Our house is 2500 square feet, 18 months old, one story. We do not have any hard wired ethernet and powerline ethernet (I know it's a little of a hot mess but just for temp purposes I tried it) blows out our breakers.

For now, we have one ethernet cable running from the west side of the house through to the south side to connect to the Dual WAN switch. I had Load Balancing turned on on the switch, but learned today that it doesn't really do load balancer the way I thought - it's just "is this connection up or down" for routing.

Everything actually mostly works okay except from about 5PM to 10PM - I assume everyone else in our new sub with no decent internet is maybe doing the same thing - but I'd love to make sure I'm doing this all right. Right now we do have the TP Link Wifi Router set up in addition to the Mesh - two separate SSIDs, Mesh is in AP mode - because the Wifi 6 seems to do better for streaming. (TP Router is in between switch and primary mesh)

What isn't working?
Anydesk constantly drops - the servers I'm connecting to are wired to a satellite mesh
Streaming video for training at work is spotty
Video doctor appointments are spotty
Paramount+ and Disney+ aren't working at all since Saturday despite everything else mostly working okay.

What is working?
Netflix, Youtube TV (mostly), Prime Video
Regular surfing/Youtube

I did also order from Amazon (but haven't put into play yet) a failover Dual SIM router but I was really hoping to use both connections at once. We have about 50 devices but most of them are smart home devices, only about a dozen will use any real bandwidth.

ER605 switch - do I turn LB back on? Do I force traffic from one network out of one router, and traffic from the other out the other hotspot router? When I turned LB off today both my husband (he's on the opposite side of the house from me and all the routers) and I got screaming fast connections all afternoon. The average today was 35/16.

Something I'm dabbling with tonight is a mobile LTE router that has external/replaceable antennas and it seems better, but I don't know if that's just a coincidence. The ones we have had in place for a week are $50 routers with static antennas.

An option we have is to get the RV version of Starlink, but it's more expensive per month and I'd rather get the home version if we can. It says they hope for EOY, but they said that last year until they pushed everyone due to supply chain issues.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or anything to simplify this. We are open to hard-wiring or chucking all of this if there's a better solution.

posted by getawaysticks to Technology (14 answers total)

Unlikely but just in case: you say "we". Did YOU get fired from the local ISP or was it your whole address? If you're living with someone, maybe they could set up an account with your local ISP for the interim?
posted by aniola at 10:09 PM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

Successfully designing, let alone running and maintaining, a home LAN with multiple Internet gateways absolutely counts among the Dark Arts. I strongly doubt that anybody here is going to be able to give you any advice more useful than just to keep the complexity of what you put together down to a level that you feel like you've got a handle on, and just fiddle with the settings you have available until you figure out what works best for you.

Don't waste your time pining after a theoretical Best Practice; such a thing probably doesn't exist. Just do what you can as and when you need to, solving specific problems as they arise.

When I turned LB off today both my husband (he's on the opposite side of the house from me and all the routers) and I got screaming fast connections all afternoon.

Cool! Do that then.
posted by flabdablet at 4:49 AM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

What I would personally prioritize in your shoes is installing as much Cat6 wiring as I could possibly wedge into my walls and floors and ceilings. Wires have so many fewer obscure failure modes than wireless and the throughput can't be beat.
posted by flabdablet at 4:53 AM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

You don't say much about antennas - our rural 4G internet (in the UK) has become on average faster and more stable since we got an external directional antenna, pointed at a specific mast.

Previously our antenna-less router, or internal omni-directional antenna, would connect to different masts, presumably whichever had the strongest signal, but that doesn't necessarily correlate with the best speed. So we'd often be turning the router off and on, up to a dozen times, to try and force it to connect to a better mast.
posted by fabius at 5:23 AM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Check out https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/ and consider a subscription. What you’re trying to do is very similar to what full time RVers do regularly, especially those who work while on the road. They have a lot of resources including test reports for various devices and a private FB group where you can ask questions
A few things to consider:
- are your mobile hotspots getting a good signal when things are going poorly? Would adding antennas to the hotspots or a cellphone booster help? As mentioned above, directional antennas pointed at the least congested cell towers may help
- are either or both of your mobile accounts subject to network deprioritization? That can cause a significant slowdown if the cell network is congested, because you get slowed down more.

When you say LB are you talking about load balancing or link backup? Your router should support both. Load Balancing with Application Optimized Routing should help, but I haven’t specifically used this model of router, so I don’t know for sure how well it works.
posted by dttocs at 5:43 AM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Both t-mobile and Verizon have been pushing their LTE-as-broadband products lately. Starlink has also started offering "best effort" service which might get you in earlier while keeping your spot in line for full residential. There are external antennas that may help if you go the LTE route. They are not magic, but they can help under the right circumstances.

Did you really get fired for a good reason? Can you go back hat in hand and maybe talk to someone else? If you were an asshole with your words, maybe that is reversible. If you were doing stuff on their service that they do not want you to be doing, then maybe not.

Right now, you're pretty much asking how you can use both connections from two LTE routers and this is not easy.

Combining two connections and treating it as a single connection is called bonding. Having a bonded pair across two disparate mobile routers is sorta crazy talk. The protocols the internet is built on just don't work this way. Swapping back and forth packet to packet isn't really how things are designed. Some VPN products attempt to fake this at a higher level by alternating connections on your side and putting it back together on their side before exiting the VPN tunnel.

There is a thing called "Multi-WAN" that you can use (expensive) hardware like a Peplink balance to manage. It is complicated on top of being cost prohibitive.

You could manually load balance between the two routes using vlans or pinning specific IPs to each WAN. Again, this can be complicated and isn't going to be smartly using as much of your bandwidth as you have. It will do what you configure it to do.

I'm not sure for any of this TP Link is the right hardware. You're demanding more than most of the consumer grade networking appliances really give you. Maybe something like Mikrotik or Ubiquity would help you more?

If I were you, I'd look for Best Effort Starlink and try to simplify the home routing as much as you can.
posted by cmm at 6:03 AM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

I don't know much about the details of nontrivial LAN setup, but want to chime in to say however bad it gets, don't be tempted to bother with HughesNet or other "traditional" satellite internet access: the bandwidth caps are bad enough, but the latency is the real killer; ping time measured in seconds instead of millis.
posted by ook at 12:00 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Have your partner call and say he's your cousin or something and is now renting your place, and that he wants to transfer service into his name. Just make sure to use a different bank account or credit card to pay with.

Yes, it's a fib, but gosh it seems easier than all this faffing about with linked wifi hotspots.
posted by ananci at 12:06 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: All, thanks very much for your comments. I agree that hard wiring would be better if we can swing it, and will review all other comments for feasibility.

Answers to questions: I wasn't an asshole, I just complained (politely) a few too many times about paying for 35/7 and getting... 10/2? They were unable to fix our issues so they fired us under the guise of "customer service is our top priority and we can't meet your needs." They have removed the antenna, we already went back (both of us, separately) to try to recover the relationship. It would be several hundred dollars to have it installed again.

LB => load balancing but I will look at link backup

We are not in range of t-mo or Verizon home internet.

Thanks very much for all your helpful comments!
posted by getawaysticks at 1:35 PM on October 4, 2022

Yeah it sounds like Starlink was made for you. Have you tried contacting their support to see if you can get yourself flagged for Best Effort service?
posted by cmm at 3:15 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm still not clear on why you are using 2 hotspots. Were you hoping to use the combined bandwidth of both of them? As others have pointed out I'm not sure that's possible outside of a very complicated enterprise network. If it were me I would pick just one hotspot and hook it up to the mesh Wi-Fi and put up with that until you can get faster internet. But if you are absolutely dedicated to the 2 hotspot idea, you could just have two completely separate Wi-Fi networks and have each one running off a hotspot. Then you can play around with the best configuration: half of the high bandwidth devices and half of the low bandwidth devices on each network? All of the high bandwidth devices on one network and all of the low bandwidth devices on another? It's probably impossible to know without just trying to get out which configuration would be best. This runs the risk of the Wi-Fi networks interfering with each other but just said each network to non-overlapping channels and that should avoid that problem.
posted by Tehhund at 9:54 AM on October 5, 2022

Were you hoping to use the combined bandwidth of both of them? As others have pointed out I'm not sure that's possible outside of a very complicated enterprise network.

It absolutely should be possible! After all, the entire reason that packet-switched networking was even invented was to avoid wasting costly network bandwidth by letting packets find their way through the network via any free router they encounter: mo routers, mo bandwidth.

But TCP/IP is actually kind of rubbish as packet-switched networking protocols go, Network Address Translation makes the rubbish even smellier, and Carrier Network Address Translation loads it up with fish heads until it stinks to high heaven. What actually ends up running in every cellphone-connected home LAN is a horrid packet-switched/circuit-switched hybrid that simultaneously exposes the worst characteristics of both: mo routers, mo problems.
posted by flabdablet at 1:25 PM on October 5, 2022

Response by poster: Hi @Tehhund, we honestly just went to the mobile store to get one hotspot card. He said that if you have a lot of devices, maybe consider two cards/two hotspots. I think it was because he also recommended hotspots from Walmart which have a 15-device limit? Not sure. But it has been helpful so far - sometimes the west one isn't as strong, sometimes the south one isn't, and at night one isn't enough speed for us to do almost anything. If we got the speeds we get during the day at night, we wouldn't need the second hotspot. The cost is still way less than we were paying our crappy 'line of sight' provider. Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks @flabdablet - I thought it was probably possible. We are on a budget (gotta save up for $tarlink) so unfortunately as others have mentioned up-thread I can't really go out of the consumer lines like TP Link. The mobile hotspot routers we have are just the $50-100 variety, nothing fancy.
posted by getawaysticks at 8:27 PM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks @flabdablet - I thought it was probably possible.

Anybody could be forgiven for thinking that.

It really isn't, though, not with consumer grade mobile service providers and/or router gear, mainly because TCP/IP really does suck. Path of least pain is pretty much just keep juggling what you have to get as close as it lets you to what you need and give up on expecting that it's ever going to be perfect.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]