I need some help from you guys.
I think I found a new place to live. I'm not completely sure yet because the company managing the property might still reject me as a tennant because the height of my alamony payments has not been set yet, and they want to be sure I can make rent, but I am guesing there is about a 90% probability that I can finaly, after more than two years of troublesome cohabitation move out and make a beginning at my new life.
It's a nice place about 20 minutes cycling from my old house and my youngest daughters school, close enough for my kids and far enough not to have to walk into my estranged wife too often.
So yesterday I was looking into some things already, furnuture, what dentist and GP I could choose, and then facilities like power, water and internet.
Fiber internet in the Netherlands
I live in the netherlands. Currently I have a fiber internet connection from a company called KPN, that took over my previous fiber internet provider Xs4All, an internet provider that I had used since when it was still called hacktic more than 30 years ago, and that I used to work relatively closely with when I worked as a system administrator for the Amsterdam Digital City project (dds). Even if xs4all doesn't exist anymore as a company, I still have my oldest e-mail adress from them that I had since 1994, and that some people still use.
Looking at the available internet providers for my prospective new home though, I noticed that KPN only provides ADSL internet at speeds of no more than 0.2/0.06 Gbps at most, and while I could make do with 0.2/0.2, because that is what I have now, the 0.06 Gbps opstream would be just too tight for comfort, especialy for the plans I have with the minisforum A01 that I've ordered. In fact, I was planning to use my move to a new address to start upgrading my now mixed 1Gbps/100Mbps network with 0.2/0.2 internet to a mixed 10Gbps/2.5Gbps network with a 4/4 internet. So the idea of having to downgrade to 0.06 Gbps upstream instead isn't really an option. 4Gbps at my current address is not that much more expensive than my current subscription.
So what other options do I have? There are a few companies selling fiber internet at my new location. Delta seems the most viable being the only one that offers 4Gbps at my new prospect address, but there are issues. Odido might be an alternative, but they only offer 2Gbps and they share one of the problems that Delta has. And then there is Solcon, they only offer 1Gbps, but it seems maybe they don't have the main problem that the other two have: No static IP address.
My current setup
My current network is ancient. I have two 1Gbps switches, one at ground floor level and one at the second floor. The switches are connected with two bundled 1GB connections, and there are two non-trunked 1Gbps lines going into my 10 year old NAS on two distinct vlans. The ground floor switch also connects to a 1G/100Mbps switch in the living room where the TV connect and some low trafic appliances connect to 100Mbps ports and the PS5 gets the second (of only two) 1Gbps on the 100M/1G switch. In the attic there is an even older switch that connects to a little home lab consisting of old Geode based appliances and a few Raspbery-pi, plus a banana pi. This is all just old crap that I'm not going to replicate in my new home. The attic switch also connects to a wall mounted Tp-Link access point with two 1Gbps connections. Part of my home lab (a few CHIP devices) are also connected through WiFi. And finaly there is a 1Gbps connection going to my computer screen that connects over USBC to one of my mini PCs depending on what I'm doing. It's not bad considering how old much of it is, but for a new place I feel I need to do better, and upgrading (rather than downgrading) my internet seems like the way to start.
As for having some services available from the internet. My fritzbox router allows for port forwarding. Because I have a static IPv4 address (and a whole IPv6 range as well), that IP adress can be bound to my static IP and then forwarded to an nginx proxy on my old NAS that forwards it something running on either my NAS as well, in a docker container, or to one of the appliances in my outdated homelab.
So what do I need from my new fiber internet provider? At least what do I think I need:
- More bandwith, if I start of fresh with a better home network, I should upgrade my internet speed too.
- A static IP address so I can map my DNS names to my router's external IP.
- A router that has support for port forwarding.
Delta
Delta having 4G as an option (they even have 8GB), and the price for 4Gbps is about the same as the one KPN offers at my old house, so this at first seemed like a no brainer. But not so fast. What about the staic IP and the port forwarding?
| speed | KPN (not available) | Delta (consumer) | Delta (business pro) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1Gbps | 52.50 | 57.50 | 75.0 |
| 2Gbps | - | - | 115.00 |
| 4Gbps | 67.50 | 75.00 | - |
| 5Gbps | - | - | 135.00 |
| 8Gbps | - | 125.00 | - |
So this means that if I want 5Gbps or more, I'll be paying 60 euros extra for my static IP address, what seems pretty steep, especialy given that I could get 8Gbps for just 50 euros extra, plus that that package includes TV channels and a mobile phone, not that I care about that.
But let's look further. their internet connectio comes with this modem:
The Nokia XS-2426G-B. So we get 4. 5 or 8 Gbps internet, so I would hope I could just plug it into a switch with SPF+ or 10G coper ethernet, but looking at the specs of the router I see this:
- 3x Ethernet 1Gbps
- 1x Ethernet 2.5Gbps
- 2,4GHz, 5GHz (band 1), 5GHz (band 2)
That's pretty messed up as a router for a 8Gbps internet connection, but even with 4Gbps or 5.Gbps it's not the type of router that you should want for a brand new scaled up home infrastructure with an internet speed abouve 2.5 Gbps. The router supports port forwarding though, so the 2Gbps option for a whoping 115.00 per month might be an option. But still, compared to paying 67.50 per month for 4GB at my current provider, the price is pretty steep.
Odido
For Odido, speed is capped at 2Gbps for its fastest internet connection, and it doesn't come with a static IP address. The 2Gbps option is priced at 65.00 a month, and the subscription comes with this router.
The specs of the router seem quite similar to that of the Nokia and port forwarding is supported, so because the Delta's Nokia caps the clean bandwidth of the 4Gbps dynamic IP solution to 2.5 Gbps, it's 2.50 euro less for 20% less bandwith. In my book this makes these two options pretty much equivalent, and if I end up choosing some solution with a dynamic IP address, I think I'dd pick Odido just for the fact that its insane to charge 60 euro's extra for a static IP address and 20% more bandwith that because of the router you can't actually use.
Solcon
And finaly there is Solcon. In terms of speed it's pretty poor. Their fastest option is 1Gbps. In old documentation though it does seem that Solcon has static IP adresses, so let's look.
At 57.00 euro, the 1GBps is priced about the same as Delta's 1Gbps solution with dynamic IP adress and 18 euro cheaper than the 1Gbps option with static IP. It seems Solcon comes with a Fritzbox router with fout 1Gbps ports, but as they only provide 1Gbps that should be OK. The information on their site is a bit flaky so I'm not 100% sure about the above, but if there are no solutions for me with a dynamic IP address, their 1Gbps option might be one of my options.
Options without a static IP?
The 2Gbps option from Odido for 65 a month, and the 4Gbps options with the pretty much unsuitable modem at 67.50 a month seem pretty reasonable, but lacking a static IP address, they likely won't allow me to run servers that are exposed to the internet, at least not without weird tricks. If I really need the static IP, then Solcon at just 57 a month could be an option, even if it's just 1Gbps, especialy given the fact that 2Gbps from Delta costs a whopping 115 a month. I'm not ruling it out yet, but I feel it's an out of proportions price.
So right now my options are:
- 1 Gbps, static IP at Solcon, 1Gbps port: 57 euro a month
- 2 Gbps, static IP at Delta, 2.5Gbps port : 115 euro a month
- 2 Gbps, dynamic IP at Odido, 2.5Gbps port: 65 euro a month
- 4 Gbps, dynamic IP at Delta, 2.5Gbps port : 75 euro a month
So let's look at the last two options. Maybe I can find an alternate router or maybe a bridge into my MS01 server (that comes with two SFP+ ports), that I buy myself that could replace the silly Nokia modem, and I can run some code on my MS01 that makes both option 3 and 4 viable?
Let's have a look
Dynamic DNS?
I don't know about robustness or reliability or if there would be any other issues with the dynamic IP thing, but it might be possible to get a subscription with a dynamic DNS provider, and change the A records in my own DNS to CNAME records. The last time I fiddled with dynamic DNS was at the time.
- Dynu seems like a decent option, free plan is OK and paid plan is only $9.99 a year
- ClouDNS seems like a decent alternative, but it's cheapest ($2.99/m) paid plan seems to offer less than the Dynu paid plan and higher tier plans ($5.95/m and $9.95/m) seem a bit pricey in comparison.
Both these options have servers located geographically close.
NordVPN ?
An other alternative to a static IP that I'm not sure of is NordVPN. I already have a NordVPN subscription so I can watch Tubi on my Android TV stick, and their static IP option includes a geographically near VPN server. This would mean I need to connect my Nginx docker to NordVPN shomehow, but I think that should probably be doable. Not sure about possible availability issues with this, afterall, the static IP for a VPN isn't meant for this type of workload. Maybe that is a good thing as a VPN server will likely be more crowded in the downstream trafic so a server could sit there very comfortably bandwith wise, or maybe this is just naive wishfull thinking. I know way too litle about this.
The price for a static IP with NordVPN starts at 4.20 euro per month (2 years), what is quite reasonable if this is a better option than dynamic DNS.
UPDATE: I mailed NordVPN to ask if it was possible to access a server over a VPN connection with a static IP, and they told me it's not build like that, so this option is now off the table.
Cloudflare?
Finaly a solution that untill today I hadn't heard about: Cloudflare tunneling. This seems the most profesional version of the VPN idea that is actualy meant for this. And what is nice, there is a free plan I can experiment with before I get a paid plan. But on the down side, the paid plans start at $20 per month, and where it would realy start to count in terms of availabilty, the paid plan is $200 a month, way outside of budget.
What to ?
Puting things together, I think the Delta static IP option isn't a good one. It's just too expensive. What I thin remains are the following options:
- Static IP:
- Solcon 1 Gbps, static IP: 57 euro a month
- Dynamic IP:
- Tunnel/VPN:
- Odido 2 Gbps + Cloudflare pro: 84 euro a month
- Delta 4 Gbps (2.5Gbps port) + cloudflare free: 75 euro a month
- Dynamic DNS (Dynu)
- Odido 2 Gbps: 65.80 euro a month
- Delta 4 Gbps (2.5Gbps port): 75.80 euro a month
- Tunnel/VPN:
Right now I really don't know what would be the best option. There are so many factors at play.
I would really like to hear the input of others, especialy if any of you have anything similar to any of the abouve setups. What would you pick? Go cheap and low bandwith but with a simple setup without tunnels or dynamic DNS? Or would you go for a tunnel, NordVPN or cloudflare? Or go the old way and opt for dynamic DNS?
Let me know what you think.