Broadband

I recently signed up for Eir’s fibre-based broadband package and took an immediate dislike to the Sagemcom router that it came with. It was fiddly to configure and I wanted to see if I could swap it out for an existing and more familiar broadband router I already had. This article outlines how I did this by flashing the old router with open source OpenWRT/LEDE software and configuring a VLAN to get it to work.

Until recently, Eircom’s fixed-line ADSL service was just about adequate for my broadband needs. But at over 4km from the exchange the average speeds of around 1.5Mbps download and 0.4Mbps upload have become primitive in comparison to what’s available from the newer fibre and mobile broadband services starting to roll out across the country. Things took a turn for the worse a few weeks ago when, despite repeated calls to Eircom support, the best stable speeds I could get dropped to about 0.54Mbps. I even took a screenshot. Something to show the grandchildren in years to come: