I write code on the internet every day, and I understood 0% of that article. Abstraction is a powerful thing.
He set up his own ISP in the UK, and built all the core routers himself, including designing the hardware and writing the router software - see www.firebrick.co.uk
Also to have a small router you control to monitor the data usage per device, and cumulative data usage on the wifi-WAN-uplink interface. And to establish a whole-router VPN tunnel if you want.
"To be clear, this is not stealing internet service - it is expensive and we pay for the premium, unlimited, steaming package for multiple devices."
> This is obviously somewhat overkill, so worth some explanation...
The author doesn't make it immediately obvious why they chose the particular components and why the overkill, especially for something that is so rarely used and is not aimed at enterprise scenarios. It comes at quite the cost. The FireBrick alone is £500+VAT and as far as I can tell the 3 Aruba boxes together easily cost even more. That's at least $1500 worth of equipment in the Internet Box. Couldn't the same result (within reason) be achieved with something substantially cheaper? Like a travel router, maybe combined with a RPi if needed? Of course you wouldn't really get anything close to "enterprise" but then again the occasional vacation cruise doesn't seem to beg for such features.
Yep, for example this $20 router running OpenWRT can accomplish the same: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar150/