We have had a fiber connection since 2003-4 and it have been very, very nice. At one time I had a better internet connection at home than at work. And during the pandemic we have been able to work from home without any internet connection problems.

All this has resulted in us becoming dependent on a good internet connection, and slowly things have been moved to some online service, simply because it’s convenient. However, since I’m highly skeptical about various online services all my important stuff is stored on my own “online service”. In other words I run my own server and also have local copies of all important data (i.e. external SSDs).

Sometimes I wonder why I do this, it’s extra work and money involved … but today I was reminded why. There is something wrong with the network in the house, or the connection to our house, or … In short, I can’t figure out what is wrong. The fiber converter seem to be working just fine, the switches & routers in the house seem to work, the transfer speed seem to be OK (not super fast but OK) and yet suddenly everything becomes super slow. Like really slow, my wife told me that it took 1.5h to watch a 40m show on Netflix due to all the buffering, and when I looked at the TV they must have been sending the smallest possible video because everything was very pixelated. A couple of days/weeks ago this happened once in a while, now it’s happening most of the time … could it be some problem with the lasers/fiber, with my stuff, something else? Right now I haven’t got a clue what the problem is but hopefully I get some advise on how to track this down tomorrow.

Anyway, this unreliable connection (it has taken my phone about 1 hour to send 4 photos to iCloud) makes it impossible to work with any kind of data that is stored online … except when “online” means that it’s on a server that is on my own local network. So I’m going to enjoy tomorrow – all data I need for work is stored locally, but all communication is going to be either impossible (forget Zoom/Teams calls) or be very, very slow (emails are coming in slowly … bit … by … bit). This could actually mean that I will get some stuff done tomorrow, which is good because I have a deadline.

But on Saturday I would like to have a normal internet connection, I’ve got some photos to upload/backup …

(Note: it turned out that it was all my own fault … I need to remember when I change configurations)