Sonic's Router

Introduction

For some time now, I have struggled with my internet at home. Even though I am fortunate enough to have a FTTH connection, the lacklustre performance of this has not gone unnoticed by me. I feel I pay a small fortune for internet but never quite get the advertised speed, but get fucked over with throttling. For years now, the various ISPs I've been with have a standard excuse, it has to be my router. Well, I am fucking tired of them blaming my Mikrotik RB2011.

The actual problem in the grander scheme of things is not a problem with the router I have, or the transmission medium or the network. It's all to do with saving money, see. Overseas bandwidth is expensive apparently (despite over a decade of liberalisation in telecoms and now having several undersea cables service South Africa). We all know it's to do with plain old corporate greed and profit margins. In short, the ISP CEOs feel they are very entitled to a new Mercedes every year- fuck the customers!

Recently, I made a very startling discovery- my internet, like magic, just gets better the moment I use a VPN. Using NordVPN, the problems just magically go away! That tells me it's not the router, nor the line, nor the piece of glass, nor the core network, nor anything. It's just the ISP and the FNO throttling bandwidth. This has been the case for over a year now. To be able to play Call of Duty, or any EPICGAMES title, we have to turn NordVPN on. Ridiculous that I have to pay for a VPN to get around the ISP throttling overseas routed traffic, and to game servers no less.

Services that are particularly hard hit include: Mastodon, web sites hosted in Asia, EPICGAMES servers, BitWarden, and many more.

Confronted with this information, my ISP tells me that I can either get a more modern router, migrate to IPv6, preferably both, but they vehemently deny throttling me. I know they are lying. Internet Service Providers are amongst the biggest liars on the planet. They're in the same group as estate agents and lawyers.

I know what I need to do, get a new router, humour the people I have to pay for internet, but, I want to permanently route everything over VPN and not have to deal with this nonsense anymore. The router I need, even at entry level, is pretty damn expensive. The solution is to DIY and thats exactly what happened!

To be continued...