At 5pm on Friday afternoon my ISP provided fibre modem died. I went through the usual debugging steps - turn it off and on again - but it just lit up like a Christmas tree and was completely inactive. On the one hand it was a nice reminder that I should stop working and enjoy the weekend. But on the other, you don’t realise how dependent we are on Internet connectivity these days. Streaming music, video, skyping family in other countries, everything needs connectivity. Even my home media server has grown so reliant on hosted services, that I’m unable to Chromecast locally stored media to the TV without it phoning home! - That is a story for another time.
Using my aging mobile I have been able to set up a local hotspot, but this isn’t a good, long term solution.
My current network looks something like:
One of the reasons I like my mobile offering is that it allows for additional devices (i.e. tablets or smartwatch) to share the main devices data plan. With that in mind, I have been looking at something like this D-Link DWR-920v router. Given a SIM card it will connect to a 4G network, and has an ethernet connection for other devices to plug into.
This D-Link router could just be switched out for the fibre modem when the provider has outages or, as in this case, when the modem gives up! But the Ubiquity EdgeRouter allows for setting up a load balanced connection. This means I could set up connectivity over the fibre modem and fall back to 4G if that failed.
I was wondering if anyone out there has experience with these 4G/5G routers that they could share? I would like to have a wired connection so that the all the devices in the house can keep connectivity via the EdgeRouter, and as it’s just a backup solution do not want to spend crazy money.