I’ve got absolutely shocking wired broadband speed at home and have just sighed up for a 50gb per month 4g home broadband to help bring us into the 21st century. What I want to do is have them both feeding into the same network, so that if the 4g drops out (or runs out) it will fail over to the rubbish wired version. Has anyone done this? If so, is it easy? Is it just a question of buying a router with two WAN inputs and plugging both the inputs in, or is it more complicated than that?

I’ve seen routers that can do this for you. Viglen maybe.

@aaisp offer this as a specific service. (Though more usually for redundancy)

Rachel

Who is your provider? are you in some weird ‘back of beyond’ type of place?

interested in knowing more about your 50gb 4g service, provider and costs particularly

I’m just on the edge of Norwich, next to a university, large hospital and research park, but at the end of an over stretched copper cabled BT exchange.

Both my broadband services are with EE. As my wife is also a mobile customer of theirs the 50gb 4g is £30 per month including router for 12 months. Pretty impressive I thought.

I get (up to) 152mb unlimited for £29.78 on Virgin

I’ve checked my up and down bits and get around 100mb on a slow day. I’m on cable broadband.

For what your paying and what you get is overpriced.

Asus routers can do this (the AC68 definitely) although it typically works the other way around, ie failover to mobile internet.

Aha…

https://www.asus.com/support/faq/1005715/

Thanks Flaperon. That looks like the thing. Possibly dumb question, but do I just replace my current broadband router with the Asus one and plug the 4g one into it?

Mrsfry – I would have fibre too if it was available. 4g is last resort. Still pretty impressed for the money (on paper at least).

I have an old but good Draytek router I’m not using that does this (Vigor 2820n). Yours for postage & a few quid in a charity tin if you want it. Used to use it as described above (mobile internet takes over if ADSL not available).

We have this where I work – we have 6 DSL modems and traffic gets routed across these(*). Not sure how it’s done, but Linux has had bonding for years, so if you can find a tame linux box (e.g. Raspberry Pi with a couple of extra USB-to-ethernet adapters) then that would work:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt

(*) Waiting for fibre from a certain well-known provider. We’ll get it in two weeks is what they’ve been saying for the past 6 months.

I’m a Draytek fan as well, I’ve done this with 3g and a 2820, but I don’t think they’re 4g compatible, although some of the more up to date Drayteks are.

Just googled it, seems you’re right unfortunately!

Have you checked to see if the local BT cabinet is due to have a fibre upgrade?

http://www.homeandwork.openreach.co.uk/OurNetwork/Superfast.aspx

Thing with the fibre to cabinet is the signal length is only between your house and the cabinet and it’s fibre to the exchange. Result is often a terrible signal to the exchange is replaced by an excellent signal and massive speed increase via the local cabinet.

Thanks all. Unfortunately BT haven’t got any plans to install fibre locally at the moment. I think it is likely to be a few years.

I really like the look of the Asus Ac68, but am nervous about how easy it would be to set up. Would I need a separate modem to replace my EE Brightbox, or could I just plug the phone line into the Asus?

My sonically firewall will do this also (although backwards…. Failover to mobile 3/4g).

I have an Asus that falls back to 4G, works well.

As for replacing your modem, if you’re on ADSL then you will need an Asus with a suitable connection for that and it should be okay so long as you have your login details etc for your BT broadband.

If you’re on sky or another provider then it can be trickier as some use different auth types.

Edit…. Just checked and with Merlin firmware on my ASUS I can pick which is the primary WAN and which is secondary so presuming you could do 4G as primary and fall back to ADSL, see the options here:

Link to Pic