I spent a long time deliberating over it, but we finally decided to change our internet provider.
Out with the MEO very "narrow band" and in with Gardunha Broadband for much more accessible broadband.
Because we host this website and a number of other services on our home server computer, the lack of fast internet is a huge drawback. The MEO service was good with the facilities that they provided and whilst the system worked, it was extremely sluggish and consumed all of the available bandwidth which in turn interfered with the TV service also from MEO on the same copper wire connection. Although we were told that it should be up to 40Mb/s download, it rarely achieved 10Mb/s, usually around 3-4Mb/s, and the upload speed never exceeded 1Mb/s - terrible.
Gardunha Broadband presents a very different bag of worms with a new set of challenges.
Firstly, they only provide an IPv6 address to the internet and no inbound IPv4 address. This is not a problem for accessing the web, the mechanism for moving packets between the two versions is well established and the router takes care of all that. The router itself is unfortunately very limited and lacks a few essential functions, the inability to configure it via a web interface is a serious limitation, and having to use the Deco app on the 'phone to configure everything is very frustrating. No option to turn off the DHCP server on the device is a disgrace to the developers, I had a perfectly functioning DHCP server up and running on the network and have no choice except to turn that off and use the TP-Link offering.
Once I had worked out most of the nuances of the new router I then had to determine how to get IPv4 access to the servers via the public IPv6 internet address. The IPv6 process is simple, with the appropriate AAAA records added to the DNS it all worked fine. However, not everyone has IPv6 internet access. Some kind of gateway or tunneling process is needed which allows the use of custom network ports. I had previously been investigating the Cloudflare service which provides such functionality and after a few days of experimentation, I was able to configure Cloudflare to act as a DNS server and as a proxy for the websites. Whilst not a perfect solution, the setup provides the functionality needed.
As you can read this entry the websites are now back online, my remote access to the servers and the home automation devices are restored and all is reasonably good.
On top of all that, the upload speed is now around 30Mb/s which means streaming music and videos out of the network is, once again, acceptable - you should be seeing a much faster page refresh and the photo album application is now much more useable (although it does still take a little time to start up). Download speed is around 100Mb/s so system updates, and downloading large files for operating systems and software packages are no longer a drag.