Need advice with Wireless Broadband

Not familiar with them :blush:

Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver is one of their more famous songs (along with the theme song for South Park).

There are services here that claim to be able to boost your cellular home internet speed by 50% or more. Not exactly sure what snake oil they’re using, probably some caching and optimization of packet sizes etc. Highly doubt it is any major difference and likely causes latency and other issues that negate whatever tiny speed increase they get you.

But the people who chase high speed test numbers probably happily pay up for it. God knows the ISPs here are happy to tell a 90 year old couple they need 2 gig internet because they have “multiple devices”.

My 300/300 plan is recommended for “light use with 1-2 devices” :rofl:

My favorite is Xfinity/Comcast’s latest scam where if you want more than 10 megs upload speed you have to buy their 1 or 2 gig plan which bumps you to like 50 upload.

Your 30/10 is probably plenty for the vast majority of people. And I’m guessing compared to what you used to have, it’s probably seems like 10 gig.

Is that a beaver?

Yeah, I’ve seen those where they claim that 100Mbps download is only good for one person households.

Honestly, more or less I do everything that I do at home with 1Gbps/50Mbps.

Yes it is

Make a warm hat :rofl:

The sucker roams the property when I am asleep :rofl:

He’s calculating where to chew so that the tree will land on your cottage.

If that happens I’ll make sure he ends up on the hat rack :grin:

EDIT: @dave27 , on another note, are you familiar with Tailscale and what’s your take on it?

Haven’t used it myself but for people that don’t have wireguard functionality (or another decent VPN, depending on the bandwidth needed) built into their router, have heard it is a very user friendly front end to run it on a spare PC or other device on the network. Personally I prefer a router based VPN solution just for simplicity, but if the router doesn’t support it and you have a spare machine or another appliance like a NAS that can run it, may make more sense than investing in a new router setup. Could probably even repurpose an old router to sit there and just run the VPN.

Look at you, finally have enough usable bandwidth to potentially have a site to site VPN between home and cottage? Did you ever figure out if they’re throttling your Plex (and/or Netflix/Amazon/etc)? Looking for a way around that? :slight_smile: Obviously there are countless benefits besides that to linking the two places together too.

I’ve always been a tad spoiled being able to grab whatever previous generation stuff I want from work so a couple small enterprise grade VPN appliances take very little power and set up a very nice site to site VPN. Used to have that set up to family members houses but pretty much can just use teamviewer and SSH/SFTP to troubleshoot their stuff these days so not really needed anymore. Remote access to my own place I just use the built in VPN server on my asus router, it isn’t huge bandwidth but plenty for when I travel and might need emergency remote access.

Didn’t try Netflix/Amazon but my Plex was streaming everything in 480p. Not sure if they were throttling the connection or my Plex server was transcoding at 480p due to fluctuating bandwidth. That is the reason I want to try site to site VPN even though my Plex is behind Nord VPN. Interesting though, the IPTV was streaming at full resolution, took a while to update the EPG, again I’m guessing due to fluctuating bandwidth.

I use TeamViewer and AnyDesk or just VNC into my Plex server for maintenance and stuff, but I wouldn’t mind having site to site VPN. The Eeros don’t have VPN functionality and I don’t want to change routers so I’m looking into simple software based VPN so I can experiment and see if that solves the streaming issue.

Latency can impact it too, which is bound to be higher on cellular but now that it is “upgraded” maybe it will stabilize out.

For local stuff I use remote desktop (MS only, sorry :stuck_out_tongue:) as it is exceptionally fast. But I do have one machine that remote desktop screws up the streaming feed it is sending out to the internet (known bug with it on Windows 10 and up) so I use NoMachine for that, performs nearly as well as remote desktop, but does need a bit more bandwidth. One of the biggest things I like about remote desktop is it runs at the resolution of the client PC when you connect, without changing the resolution at the host you’re connected to. VNC, Nomachine, Teamviewer, etc use the resolution of the remote machine and obviously it is limited to the max resolution of the monitor connected. So my 1080P laptop often shows them in a window rather than full screen.

Anything over the internet I do teamviewer, saves the hassle of opening ports and having dynamic DNS, and is more secure.

If you have a couple spare machines (I’m guessing the Plex box can be one of them) or maybe old routers, might as well give the site to site VPN a try. Rather than using a pre-shared key, generate certificates if you can, more secure.

You are correct, I totally forgot that internet there has a high latency. Pings are are in 48-170 ms where at home rarely go above 3 ms.

Ha, ha, ha, Apple has its own variant called Screen Sharing and it’s built into MacOS. It uses VNC protocol and I connect to both my headless servers locally. I have also punched a whole in the firewall and I can access them over the internet if for whatever the reason I can’t use TeamViewer or AnyDesk. On my servers I have a utility that allows me to view them at any resolution that the video cards on those machines can support. I can view them in a window or full screen. On a local LAN it is extremely fast, over the internet feels the same as TeamViewer.

Pardon my ignorance, but what are the benefits of site to site VPN?

Basically making them both the same “LAN”. Convenience, lower latency than going through a VPN server somewhere, and you can access everything without having to expose ports to the internet and map everything out.

There are different ways of doing it, I’ve set some up where both sites are literally the same subnet and everything is as though it is on the same LAN, others where they’re two different subnets but with full access to each other through the router. Most setups these days allow you to have that site to site VPN set up alongside a client based VPN so you can access both sites remotely when travelling etc too.

The same subnet design would let you for example stream your Wyze cams directly rather than through Wyze servers, but even the two different networks lets you use remote desktop type apps, file sharing, all that good stuff that potentially could be a security risk to open to the internet. Also prevents them from throttling video streams between the two if they are in fact doing that, since it would be invisible to them.

I suppose a site to site VPN could just be considered a more permanent setup than a client based one, and doesn’t rely on a client device running a VPN client, it does it at the network level and makes it mostly invisible to all the devices on the network. Sort of like running an ethernet cable between the two locations.

I used to use VNC heavily before remote desktop came out (yes I’m aware how long ago that was). Even after RDP, there were certain things where I had to control the local session and not a separate one and used it for that.

These days there is one machine I can’t use RDP on and I’ve grown really fond of NoMachine, seems much smoother and more efficient than VNC and tons of options to customize the experience. In my case the device is a laptop and the max resolution is locked to the screen in the laptop. I can scale it up to my viewing screen but that’s pointless, just makes everything blurry. If I plug a higher resolution external monitor into the laptop, then I can bump the resolution up on the viewing machine, but that would be kind of silly. Guess I need to design a dummy HDMI dongle to trick it into thinking an external 1080P screen is attached. It isn’t a big deal, I don’t work remotely on it a ton, it mostly just sits there and chugs along doing its job.

I’m going to be converting it into a LInux based server soon, so that opens up some more/better options for remote control and config. I think the main reason RDP is able to change the resolution is that it is a totally separate user session from the local login using MS Terminal Services, whereas all the others are logged in using the local session and are stuck with the hardware settings of that session.

I have to use caution, running this little laptop based server is like having a sip of beer after a decade of sobriety. I’ll end up with a rack of servers and enterprise network gear again if I’m not careful.

Interesting and very intriguing. have some reading to do on seting up site to site VPN. I guess the ideal situation would be to have VPN capable routers at both locations.

It is, but opening a single random port to a device behind the router (many people use a NAS or other device that is already serving some other purpose) is a minimal security risk and accomplishes the same thing, especially if you generate certificates and don’t rely on just a password.

In my line of work we use L2TP for the “single LAN” style VPN, however if I’m remembering correctly, Wireguard has a Layer2 mode that allows that same setup. Haven’t toyed much with it though. If you want two separate subnets (wyze I believe will still go through their servers in that case but most other stuff will route directly) then pretty much any of the protocols can do that, Wireguard typically being the fastest and most efficient these days.

Of course at least one site will need a dynamic DNS setup (plenty of free ones out there, most routers support it) so if the IP changes the tunnel can reconnect without you having to find your IP and update the config.

I have been reading on Tailscale and it is using Wireguard protocol. Another interesting thing about it is as they don’t need DDNS as they use NAT Traversing. I just have to find a low powered appliance that I can install Tailscale as I don’t want to leave a high poweedr device on all the time at the cottage.

The electricity at the cottage is three times more than in the city. I get charged even when I am not there and nothing is running. They have an astronomically high delivery charge fee, probably they’re using bonded courier to deliver it. :rofl:

The problems the rich and famous have to endure. Get the beavers to build a hydroelectric dam. :laughing:

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