Network Setup - An Introduction

Earlier this year I moved to a new place of residence. This time I decided to try out something new with the network setup. In this post I will be describing the network overview, and then go into details about each part.

The two options I had available were xDSL and LTE/HSPA¹. Economically xDSL did not really make sense, the total monthly cost would be about 50-70 % higher compared to LTE. The only reason xDSL may make sense is that I receive a public IPv4 address, which makes it relatively easy to gain access to my home network when travelling. I decided to bite the bullet, make this an experiment, to skip the xDSL and try if I could make LTE work. Of course the whole idea was to make this not expensive, meaning trying to avoid having to buy any hardware.

To make this experiment a success I had one simple target; the file server running on my desktop should be accessible from anywhere on the internet. A bonus is I am able to use RDP as well, but there are simple workarounds for that.

My hurdles? Turns out there are a couple:

• I have no USB LTE modem. I do have a USB HSPA modem, but that is an older one which supports … about 7 Mbit/s… Which is slow.
• My ISP (mobile carrier) implements CG-NAT for IPv4, meaning I have no public IPv4 address.

Bummer.

Not giving up yet. One hurdle at a time. Next post will go into how I tackled the modem issue and the consequences.