This was a long and arduous journey. I cannot emphasize this enough. Whilst there was no blood, there was certainly sweat and tears. Hear me out.
I live in the UK, I have a fibre (fiber?) deal with Virgin Media, and I use their 5x Hub.
Note, I also use a UDM Pro and a lot of custom UniFi gear… you have seen the other posts, right? I mean it’s literally in the name of the website.
Anyhoo. I have 1gig down, 100meg up. No symmetrical for me, no 2gig down for me, just what is advertised because I live in the stix of the UK.
I had read about the WAS110 stick that could replace the home hub 5x – but damn, it was expensive, so I put it off for about a year or so. I came across this deal from Fibermall an decided to take the plunge. Now, please, bear in mind I can do the Proxmox thing, containers and docker and Raspberry Pi’s and all of the homelab things but I have ZERO experience with what to do with custom coding SFP sticks.
That being said, when I received it, I broke it. Hard. I set the IP to 192.168.1.255 that my UDM couldnt see, I entered all the details from all of the helpful youtube videos I could find, nothing worked.
In order to fix the bloody thing I had just spent $160 on, I had to buy an SFP Buddy (see the next post) and then when it arrived from the USA I still couldnt get shit working. I was sad. Super sad. Like $200 sad.
So I gave it a couple of weeks, and spoke to the 8311 community on Discord. Both the creator of the software, as well as the creator of the SFP Buddy helped me through the steps to reset the stupidity on my SFP stick and we were off to the races.
I mean, like, really racing! My usual download speed in Steam was about 98MB/s down, this lifted it to 140MB/s down. Almost 50% more for the lack of the overhead of the 5x Hub. Amazing. I love this.
Does it run hot? Yes. Do I fear for my house burning down in the middle of the night or when I am at work, yes. But the speed of the internet through this little device and the removal of double NAT is amazing. I love it. And I love the community behind it even more. The sheer patience that the community showed me was brilliant and they helped me through every step of resolving my fuck up.
Open source is amazing. Humans are amazing. I am a plebian but at least I have faster internet.
Hurray!