Need a wired broadband connection with 4g backup. One router?

BartonFunk · Oct 6, 2015

Hi

I run a small business and we need a good internet connection for 3 main reasons:

All orders are managed via a custom web application
All PDQ/Credit card payments are sent via internet connection
We currently use VOIP for telephone communications

Our internet connection isn't bad but can occasionally go offline. We need a reliable backup and I'm wondering if there's a 'One router' solution. Ideally, we'd be able to set a 'Preferred' network (which would be the wired/landline connection) and if that was available it would always be used. When it wasn't available it would switch to 4g automatically. As soon as the Preferred network was connected again it would switch back, so that the 4g connection was used as little as possible.

Does such a thing exist? If not, could you suggest any alternatives for me?

TIA,
Chris

bill001g · Oct 6, 2015

A lot of them have that feature you just have to search the vendor site. The newer asus and tplink can do that and there are a number of dual wan routers. Of course you can load third party firmware on many routers and that too has this feature.

The harder part is getting a router that supports a particular 4g dongle. You must careful dig though the list of supported dongles and check both the hardware and the ISP. Just the hardware alone is not enough the ISP have slight differences. Some dongles are not supported at all other than on the ISP special router (many of those can do the backup option too).

Now once you get that all figured out the hard problem is how do you do it automatically. They switch really well if you were to unplug the eterrnet cable, but that is not how the internet normally goes down. This also gets into what does "down" mean. What happens if you can get to some internet location but not the ones you really need or you are getting data loss that makes it very slow but it barely functions.

A number of these routers you can give it a ip address to ping to check if the network is up but that is about the best you are going to see. Now if you run third party firmware there are a bunch of scripts people have written to test different things. This option though is not for beginners

You will likely many times have to force it to move manually in the router config page. In any case because you are using different connection(ie IP addresses) all your sessions including VoIP calls will drop and you will have to reestablish them. So you do not want it switching back and forth if the main connection is going up and down a lot.

BartonFunk · Oct 6, 2015

Hi Bill

Thanks for all the info. That's very useful. With all of that in mind I think a dual wired/4g router with the ability to swap manually from one to the other would be the most workable solution. We're limited as to which 4G ISP's we can use in our area as the premises are in a Vodafone black spot. Any client with a Vodafone phone can't access the net from here.

I use EE which works well so I'll try and stick with them for the 4G SIM. Thanks for the heads up re the compatibility pitfalls. The D-Link 4G LTE works with EE as I've just found EE Pay as You Go SIM and router being sold together as a package on Amazon. It's a bit pricier that I'm used to for a router but I'm guessing the Dual wired/4g routers will be.

Cheers,
Chris

Search

Need a wired broadband connection with 4g backup. One router?

BartonFunk

Distinguished

bill001g

Titan

BartonFunk

Distinguished

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page