I used to live in a building with FTTP. Gigabit fibre both ways, those were good times. It was Hyperoptic, Pine Media were also in the area. I managed to get 900Mbps down and 850 up, which is pretty good. I probably hit a limit on my end.

Then I moved house. We only have ADSL2. 8 down, about 0.2 up. Painful.

It was workable for download, but with video calls and VPN access in the lockdown we had to change this. My wife has a work NHS Windows laptop that seems to drink bandwidth even when not in use.

So I got two SIM modems and set them up load-balanced to my router. Now I get ~40down ~20up on one client, and you can get that on two clients at the same time thanks to the load balancing. Latency is not great, but it’s working well.

One issue is that the only decent signal for this was Vodafone. The problem is they have a hard block on websites that you cannot get around, even by disabling adult content block. (https://www.torproject.org/ is blocked, for instance)

However, they are the only provider I can get any sort of speed on. ADSL barely works.

So I set up a VPN on digital ocean, and connected each SIM through it. This gets around the block, and has the added benefit of giving you the same public IP even with the load balancing.

It’s been a long lockdown…