The Great Home Network Upgrade

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· 3 min read
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I’ve been using Bell Fibre 1Gbps plan for a few years since moving to the upper beaches of Toronto. Bell Gigahub is my ISP’s router. I get 800Mbps sitting on the couch next to it.

But I was only getting 15-25 Mbps in my upstairs office with a TP-Link wifi extender.

I was only getting 12Mps in the toilet with the door closed! (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

A lot of great work happens while ruminating on the can. The speed of internet in my toilet is therefore important.

One of the major mistakes previously was setting up a Wifi extender without using ethernet backhaul to the original ISP router. That would have forwarded more of the bandwidth to the office.

So I wasn’t getting my money’s worth from my connection, and I’m not in a situation where I can run ethernet cables. I wasn’t sure how successful I would be using a powerline adapter in a hundred year old house, so I went with a set of Deco XE75 mesh hubs.

Setup 1: Bell Gigahub as the original router and Deco XE75 in access point mode

flowchart TB subgraph Public["🌐 Public"] ISP["ISP(Bell)"] end subgraph Private["🏠 Home network"] Gigahub["Bell Gigahub"] DecoXe75["TP-Link Deco XE75<br/>Parent hub set to access point mode"] DecoO["TP-Link Deco <br/> Office"] DecoB["TP-Link Deco <br/> Basement"] NAS["NAS (Pi 4B)"] end ISP --> Gigahub DecoXe75 -->|Eth 1| Gigahub DecoXe75 -->|Eth 2| NAS

I disabled the Wifi part in the Bell Gigahub and logged in with PpPoe.

This was easier than I thought besides finding out the “MyBell” password is not the same as the one you use to log in to your Bell account, and you may have to call Bell to retrieve it.

For separation of concerns, I created a separate 2.5 GHz wifi network only for the IoT and smart home devices and put them on a different SSID and channel.

The two other TP-Link Deco Hubs form a mesh network to boost the connection in my home for future IoT projects or smart home devices.

View of the TP-Link Deco XE75 mesh net from my phone

I initially thought I could replace the Bell Gigahub with a different router I had lying around, but discovered that it has a SFP module baked in for fiber connectivity. There are some userland vlogs explaining how they’ve extracted and replaced it, but I wasn’t about to go down that rabbit hole.

The Bell Gigahub was previously able to be set to bridge mode, but this was disabled over a year ago.

With this meshnet set up, I managed to more than double the download speeds around my home and get rid of deadzones.

Setup 2: Bell Gigahub as an internet gateway and Deco XE75 in router mode

My cousin had a spare Pi 3B lying around, so we set it up to run AdGuard Home to block ads and trackers on a network level.

We changed Bell Gigahub to identify the Pi 3 on a reserved static IP, rebooted the Gigahub, and then all devices on my local network started appearing under its range.

flowchart LR subgraph Public["🌐 Public"] ISP["ISP (Bell)"] end ISP --> Gigahub subgraph Private["🏠 Home network"] Gigahub["Bell Gigahub Gateway"] subgraph "🔗 Mesh network" PiGuard["Pi 3B running Adguard Home"] house["NAS (Pi 4B)"] DecoP["TP-Link Deco XE75 <br/> Parent hub"] DecoO["TP-Link Deco <br/> Office"] DecoB["TP-Link Deco <br/> Basement"] Devices["IoT devices" ] end end house -- Eth Lan 1 --> DecoP DecoP -- Eth Lan 1 --> Gigahub PiGuard -- Eth Lan 2 --> DecoP Devices -- Wifi 2.4G for IoT --o DecoP DecoO -.-| Wifi 5G | DecoP DecoB -.-| Wifi 5G | DecoP

Besides AdGuard Home, I’m running prom/node-exporter on a Docker container and exposing an endpoint to be scraped by prometheus running on the NAS to monitor the system performance.

And now FINALLY… by using Brave or Firefox with uBlock Origin, I’m not getting sponsored links on Google or Amazon, or ads in my browser.

By putting all my devices on Tailscale, I’m able to connect to them remotely on my phone without exposing them to the wider web.

Sources

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