The lengths I’ve gone to have OK-ish internet in London

It will make more sense later

Prelude

When moving to London, I never thought I would struggle to find a flat with a good internet connection. Boy was I wrong.

In February, I moved to a new flat in Coulsdon, after moving from Sutton, where the building I lived in had a horrible internet infrastructure, meaning it didn’t matter what provider I had I was stuck with a 300–650 Kbps download speed. My grandpa in Mexico City has better internet, no joke.

Plusnet speed (landline) It shows 4.2Mbps

but the actual download speed as you can see in the traffic monitoring graph below top is 650Kbps

Moving into our new flat I was aware the internet infrastructure was the same as our previous place, but the flat was great and cheap for what we were looking for, something that’s rare to come by in London, so we decided to take it.

After 3 years of bad internet, and both my partner and I working from home we’ve come up with a double internet solution. Our landline router with horrible speed, 300–650 Kbps download speed, but stable and with good ping, and a 4G sim router, with a max 1.6 Mbps download speed, slightly better but not stable.

Three Network (4G router) The main problem with this one is that the speed depends a lot on the time of day, currently 7:30 pm it’s overloaded, in the afternoon it’s faster. around 7.5 Mbps on fast.com

The actual download speed at the time of checking this is 166–200 Kbp, this, again is much faster in the afternoon. With actual speeds of up to 1.6 Mbps

The False Prophet

So when I found out that Starlink was available in our area, I was excited. After going through dozens of reviews of people who have it in the UK, I thought it would be our saviour from our horrible internet connections. £75 a month with a £450 antenna? If it worked It would be worth it, I thought to myself.

So, does it work?

Starlink (Satellite Internet) The speed fluctuates a lot throughout the day. For heavy downloads such as games, movies, or big updates it’s perfect.

Actual downloads of 24 Mbps

It kinda works, Starlink has actual download speeds of 6–25 Mbps, the problem is it’s kinda not stable, fast but sometimes it drops. So zoom calls are a gamble, playing online with friends is incredibly laggy. What I would end up doing for calls was changing to our 4G router connection cause it was more stable for calls and switching back to Starlink when I was done, and when none of them were working I would switch to our reliable landline.

The Solution

Changing back and forth between connections was annoying, so I started to research what options I had, I had 3 internet connections, wouldn’t it be cool if we could combine them into a fast one? Here is where Speedify comes in. (I know it sounds like an ad) I heard about Speedify a couple of years ago, it is an interesting service that binds connections into a single big connection, hear it from them;

“One connection not cutting it? Our unique channel bonding technology allows you to combine multiple internet sources into a single faster, more reliable connection.”

After playing with the settings for almost a week I settled on having Starlink as my Primary connection. Three (4G router) as my Secondary connection and my Plusnet (landline) as my Backup. I have set Great Britain as my main server, rather than Automatic since sometimes it changes to Berlin for no reason and I have UDP as Transport Mode

Side Note: here is an awesome guide on taking screenshots on raspberry pi through ssh

The Ultimate Guide to Taking Screenshots on a Raspberry Pi

# Connect via ssh to the raspberry pi and run this:
DISPLAY=:0 scrot -ub Desktop/mywindow.png
# Log out from ssh and then run this:  
scp pi@192.168.145.1:Desktop/mywindow.png .

Here are where some of the cons of Speedify start.

From a speed of 160 Mbps connected directly to Starlinks router to 30 Mbps using Speedify. The ping is much higher as well.

But not using Speedify and only relying on Starlink makes it incredibly hard to have Zoom calls for work or play games online with friends.

The Setup

Is this the prettiest setup? No. Should this be necessary in London in 2022? No. Was it fun setting it up? You bet!

I have 2 wifi dongles connected to the Raspberry Pi, and I’m using the internal wifi connection, the yellow cable is an ethernet cable connected to the TPLink router below.

The setup is pretty straightforward, fresh install of Raspbian and Speedify on an old 3b+ Raspberry Pi, with 2 USB extenders connected to 2USB wifi dongles + the internal raspberry pi wifi connection. The Raspberry Pi’s ethernet port is connected to a TPLink router which in turn provides internet to all the devices in the house.

if you are interested in the USB holder things: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2481258

I require some DHCP reservations in my network for things like Barrier so having a specific router for all those configurations makes things much easier.

Problems

This is without its problems. Because of how Speedify works, the ping is slow. Speedify sends all the connections to their servers which bond the connections on their end. Please let me know if there is a solution that does it locally.

Conclusion

There are a couple of other solutions I want to try, there are some routers that do the same thing that Speedify does, but they are a bit pricy, and I need to research more in order to buy the right one. If I find a better solution to this problem I’ll update this post. If anyone else has had a similar problem and found a different solution I would love to hear about it.