Seral’s first pillar is simple: take back your network equipment.

The router sits at the centre of a home network’s security. Every packet goes through it. It decides which ports are open, acts as the gateway to the internet, and does (or does not) protect personal data. It is the first line of defence.

These days we have less and less control over that box. ISPs push their own routers, lock the MAC address, add custom authentication, and ship a pile of proprietary code. Hard to know what is actually running in there. And what confidence can you have in a router whose admin UI is sometimes reachable over Wi-Fi and rarely patched properly?

So the better move is to pull those boxes off the home network and replace them with hardware you control, running open-source software that is audited and maintained by an active community. You can often put the ISP box in bridge mode, but if you are going to bother, go all the way and own the whole stack.

This series is fibre only. ADSL is out of scope. For help on that, lafibre.info is an excellent resource.

I split the article in two. Living in Switzerland, I tested two very different setups:

  • Init7, fibre at 25 Gbps
  • Green.ch, on the Swisscom network

Two builds:

The rest follows right after.