I work from home full time so I’m reliant on a stable broadband connection to be able to do my job. Today my fibre broadband connection had it’s first outages during my working hours, thankfully only brief ones, but it got me thinking about setting up a backup connection in the case of longer outages in the future. I’m thinking something LTE based.

I run my own FreeBSD-based router on a mini PC with six gigabit ports. My fibre connection terminates in an ONT, so I just connect one of the router ports to that and tell my PPPoE client to use that port as the uplink port. It works well.

Ideally, any backup connection would run through the same router, with some kind of service running to monitor connectivity on the main fibre connection and failing over to the backup connection automatically when IP connectivity is lost.

I can think of a few options:

  • Obtain a USB LTE dongle or mini-PCIe LTE card that’s supported by FreeBSD, and configure it as another physical device for the PPPoE daemon (mpd5) to use. Link monitoring and failover between connections can possibly be done entirely within mpd5.
  • Obtain a 4G modem similar to this and use it in bridge mode so that my router still gets the public WAN IP, avoiding double-NAT.
  • Cheapy option: Use one of my old Android handsets with USB tethering enabled and connect it to the router. Drawback of this is double-NAT; once on the phone and once on the router.

Has anyone else here investigated backup broadband connectivity for their home network and can give any advice or describe their setup?

  • beekermd03@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    If you get a Firewalla, they have the ability to have a dual WAN. One of them being your mobile

  • Background-Marzipan8@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I think the easiest thing to do would get a used 5G hub from the likes of fleabay, setup the BSD box for link fail over. What distro are you using ?

    For double NAT issue getting a real IPV4 address is a chew using regular data Sims. The only one I’ve had long term success with is 3.

    Sorry, I’m assuming your UK based ?

    • ChunkyBezel@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I’m using stock FreeBSD, not one of the *sense firewall products based on it. It allows more flexibility than the web UIs of those products.

      I am in the UK, yes. I was considering Three or EE for the SIM.

      • Background-Marzipan8@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Go for 3. It’s a pain to get out of CGNAT on EE

        Change the APN to 3internet on whatever board / modem you use and that should see you right for failover. I’m not sure you to config that on your particular HW though.