Reconnecting After a Storm

Last Friday, a storm blew down a tree which fell on the phone and internet line into the village. The first I knew of it was the internet connection being down from our wifi network, though I didn't realise at first. Occasionally, the internet connection gets dropped by our router, and resolves after a router reboot. It's one of those issues that I should really sort out, but it's both easy to fix by power cycling the router, and so intermittent that it would be difficult to debug and know whether any solution has worked. So I've lived with the occasional dropping of the connection and needing to turn the router off and on again.

But this time, when my wife complained the router needed rebooting, it didn't work. Then a minute or two later I had a text from our ISP that there was an openreach problem, our service was down, and they were aiming to fix it by 2am.

Being a Friday night, and a significant storm, I had my doubts about the 2am fix. But I was pretty impressed by the observability and notification system of the ISP.

Over the weekend, the scale of the problem became clear as neighbours shared their issues and attempts to get some info from various internet providers, and photos of the fallen tree appeared on the local whatsapp groups.

With no live TV in our house, we managed to survive a weekend without screen time for the kids. But more pressing was whether the internet would be back by Monday. Since I work remotely as a software engineer on a web platform, no internet would make things rather difficult.

While the village – which we live just outside of – isn't a large village, it's also not at all remote, and is surrounded by other villages and settlements. So I was surprised that a single line would completely knock out internet for such a large populated area. So it's interesting to consider more deeply the infrastructure on which we depend every day, yet never give any thought to.

Once it became clear that the line wasn't going to be fixed for the start of the week, I began to consider the options for getting some work done.

One option is to relocate to somewhere with an internet connection, and spend a week or two working out of coffee shops and libraries. There may still be some of that, but I also didn't want to limit my access to decent sized monitors and work off my 13 inch MacBook Air screen for an extended time. The 13 inch M3 MacBook Air is an amazing machine – capable, portable, and completely silent. But it's much easier to do serious editing and research when plugged into a couple of 4K monitors at my desk.

Relocating also wouldn't solve the problem of internet access for the rest of the family. Or outside of coffee shop hours (which working at a start up involves quite a bit of).

Another option was to get a 4G dongle – the USB stick that takes a sim card and plugs into a laptop to provide access via the mobile phone network. My initial guess was that this was the obvious way to go. But phone signal in our house isn't great, and especially in the room I use for a study.

Some research confirmed that a dongle was unlikely to serve very well, with the tiny antenna of a compact, portable usb stick giving poor performance in anything but the strongest coverage areas.

However, another suggestion was to pay a little more than the cost of a dongle and get a router which takes a sim card. I wasn't aware of this product category at all, but it provides 2 major advantages. First, being somewhat bigger than a dongle, it can make use of beefier antennae to make the most of whatever signal there is. And secondly, not needing to plug in directly to the computer, it can be positioned for best network signal, like next to a window on the other side of the house.

An additional benefit of a mobile service router is that, if I could find a way to connect it to our existing router, all our other devices in the house could remain on the existing networks, without the need to switch networks for a few days or weeks until normal service is resumed.

There were two big unknowns in embarking on this project, which are still largely unknown as I write. One is how long this temporary solution will be needed – it may be for just a few days, though probably a couple of weeks. Hopefully not many weeks or months, though it could be. The other unknown is how well a 4G or 5G router would perform, whether the stability of connection and speed would be good enough to make working from home viable, however temporarily.

Given these uncertainties, I wasn't going to fork out hundreds on a state of the art router. Some online recommendations and a timely Amazon deal led me to the TP-Link TL-MR100. The specs are not particularly impressive, but it was cheap enough to try (at least with Amazon's return policy), and available quickly enough to give it a go. I was pretty confident the router's "up to 300Mbps" wasn't going to be the rate limiting factor. That would be about 15 times faster than our usual download speed anyway.

After jumping through what felt like an inordinate number of hoops, I also managed to order a monthly, unlimited data sim from the provider rated as having the best service in our area, EE. Neither of our phones are on EE, and the fairly rubbish reception we get on our network at home usually isn't an issue as we're on the WiFi anyway. They promised 4G speeds capped at 100Mbps, though I had my doubts we'd be bumping into any such speed restrictions.

Today, both the sim card and router arrived, so I got them set up this evening, curious to see how the 4G router would perform, and how difficult it would be to get our existing router as an access point, served by the new router.

The answers, not to bury the lede any further, are that the set up was reasonably simple, and the performance is fairly terrible.

Initially, I just set up the new router as plug and play. Put in the sim card, turn it on, and move it around a few different places to test its signal and performance. The router has 3 LEDs to indicate signal level, and everywhere I tested had 2 or 3 lit. But speed tests started at around 500–600kbps, and haven't gone above 2Mbps.

I'm not sure what speed I was expecting, but this has been pretty disappointing. Tethering off my phone, with only a single or couple of bars of signal (out of 4) tended to give about 3 times better speeds.

Despite the poor speed test results, I was reasonably impressed that I managed to stream some "Have I Got News for You" and YouTube. Not at very high quality, but watchable.

The speed isn't great, but the connection stability seems to be an improvement on my tethering experience over the past couple of days. The connection dropping every few minutes has been far more annoying than the relatively slow download speeds.

As to setting up the router with our existing router (what this was supposed to be all about), I've learned a bit more about networking, so it hasn't been a complete waste of time.

The setup I've ended up with is the TP-Link 4G router providing the intenet connection, and forwarding all traffic to our existing router, operating in the "DMZ" (demilitarised zone), and our usual router then doing all its normal jobs.

To do this, I first gave the TP-Link router a new local, static IP address and set up the DHCP range. Then our normal router is plugged in with its WAN port to the TP-Link by ethernet cable. Then a new WAN interface is configured for the existing router. Once the access-point router is assigned an IP by the TP-Link, that address can be set for NAT forwarding as DMZ.

My understanding is that the TP-Link router then just passes everything to the existing router. The existing router acts as normal, but receiving packets from the 4G router instead of the usual broadband line and modem.

Time will tell whether the connection is serviceable, but I've managed to fix my hugo config and write up this post using the new connection. And so far, the stability has been far better than my tethering experience had been.

Tethering my laptop from my phone was bringing me to the end of mine.