Change ISP
Already did it once . No ISP is my area is 100% reliable.
This.
There are two fiber to the home providers in central Mississippi: AT&T and Cspire. As far as I know, Cspire is a Mississippi only ISP.
Before I moved 2 years ago, the Cspire connection was rock-solid. It never went offline.
After we moved, I could wake up on any random day and Cspire would be down for half a day. I guess I can’t complain too much since their synchronous 1GB fiber service is $85/mo, but when you have a teenager that will worry you to death about the internet being offline… well you get the idea.
So I added ATT 1GB synchronous fiber for $80/mo. I like the Cspire Ethernet handoff better than using the ATT modem (even with IP passthru). The ATT service has been stable since adding it 18 months ago. My router (EdgeRouter 4) easily does load-balancing, so I’ve kept both services.
No more downtime, I have a dedicated UPS for the network gear (separate from servers) and I can keep internet up for 8+ hours after a power outage.
I simply fall back to using 4G from another provider than fiber channel.
DSL main, cheap little LTE modem via USB as a fallback. Both are connected to my OPNsense as a gateway group. Failover happens after 5s of full packet loss (and a bunch of less aggressive failover conditions, latency etc.). That of course changes my public IPv4 address, so yes this drops existing connections. Not a big deal for most stuff, Netflix reconnects quickly enough that this isn't even noticeable. For the stuff where the connection can't drop like that, I run a VPN tunnel on each of the two uplinks to a small relay box with a static IP sitting in a datacenter. When DSL fails, the traffic is routed through the other VPN link but comes out of the relay box with the same public IP.
Do you have any tutorials that you followed for this type of configuration?
I have a Rutx12 router that has 2 cellular modems, if the WAN link fails it will route via 2 load balanced 4g connections. It works great in my hack rack and means my lab is completely mobile with no breaks in connectivity
This is the way
Unifi UDM PRO with a GL.iNet GL-X3000 (Spitz AX) 5G NR AX3000 Cellular Gateway Router for failover on the backup link. Separate providers for primary and backup. No MVNO.
We're almost in 2024. I've been on the Internet since 91. Today's telco/network equipment come with error reporting via alarms / data pushed to centralized tools that usually highlight issues. If your ISP is subpart and can't fix it's network, can't you switch to another ISP?
Also, have you done your homework and positive the issue doesn't come from any of your equipment? Why not open a ticket w/ the ISP with all the proof on hand? Are they aware?
If you've done all of that work, that they are aware and "sit & do nothing", it's fair to post the name of that ISP right here!
Your asking for redundancy. You plug in a second wan connection and configure a failover.
I don’t need failover at home. If I lose internet for a day, I’ll tether with my phone, go to a coffee shop or the office. Nothing in my homelab will die for lack of internet either
I’ve wanted one for a long time but don’t have time to deploy it.
So no fall over for mine. 💀
I have gigabit cable and fail-over to VDSL2.
I use a UDM-Pro with dual WAN configured. I previously used PfSense with load balancing and feel it did it better than the UDM-Pro, but there are other benefits to the UniFi ecosystem.
2.5Gbps main uplink and 1Gbps failover uplink, pfsense, and a 5G wireless modem in case of emergency or nuclear fallout
I run dual 4G WAN anyway because of latency and bandwidth, failover was just a bonus.
I got like 2mbps on cable, and I'm pretty sure the line is now actually broken/severed (tree fell on it) and they just never bothered fixing it because nobody uses it anyway.
Edgerouter 4 with 1 Gb symmetric fiber primary and cable 500/20 backup. Network is setup so most media devices that are down-only come through the backup so I have regular verification that it's functioning. Essentially two ports in the house supply separate networks, each with a dedicated outside line, but set up to fail over to the other outside line.
I thought they had completely dropped the Edgerouter line, but I just popped over and it looks like they're actually in stock and reasonably priced. If I had to replace the ER4, I'd probably go to an ER12, which as far as I can tell is an ER4 with a built in switch (the ER4 doesn't act as a switch between ports - each port has its own address space).
5gbps fiber and then a 5G business internet backup failover via UniFi UDM-Pro, all on UPS with a standby Generac. We can take a power and ISP outage simultaneously and have a second or so connectivity hiccup.
Sounds very inexpensive for a home user.
Funny! I have an almost identical setup, 5G fiber, 5G Home internet, udm pro on UPS. Instead of standby I have a big lithium setup and a manual inverter generator to top it off if need be. It has been great to have.
Wait, one’s supposed to have a network failover solution?
not for hobby homelabs I guess , but more of a wfh setup.
"Sorry internets out"
“Gonna take a 4 hour lunch, internets out” lol
I've got a dual-wan UXG-Pro and am lucky enough to have two 1Gbps providers (fiber + cable), plus an employer who reimburses me for both. I have a small wired T-Mobile LTE MiFi device as backup, but never needed it. ($20 a month + usage over 2GB)
Main fiber link with one ISP and cable modem with a different ISP. I'm lucky enough to live at an intersection where both options are available - and the two links are literally buried under two different roads.
I have a cheap hotspot that I use for fail over of a couple things like home automation and remote access. Not enough data to do a full fail over but keeping a couple things going is enough.
try increasing your speed. we had an issue once like this, turns out one of our systems was flooding the connection and it would reset. Once we increased the speed the bottleneck went away and it quit happening
I have a pretty minimal setup , Few smart devices , phones, computers and a desktop server. I don't think of any of those devices creating issues.
get a mikrotik they are good for the price and setup recursive routing so what I'm using right now is 2 wans or you could use 1 wan and 1 4g or plug a phone on the usb port and turn on usb tethering so basically recursive routing checks if a host is up on a line say isp 1 pings to see if 1.1.1.1 is up if not switch to isp 2 isp 1 is my own line and isp 2 is my apartment's shared internet connection that has unstable speeds but for failover, it's better than nothing
pfSense virtual router connect to a FTTP NTD and a Huawei LTE 4G router
Standard ISP and cradlepoint AER 3000 with Verizon and ATT back up
I have T-Mobiles Internet @Home, and CTL fiber both routed into my OpenWrt router, configured to do fail over
My primary is 200/200 fiber, and uses 5G as failover.
I host my VPN on a small vps, with nginx proxy manager, it routes my service’s back to my router using wireguard
My openwrt router is a Pi 4 operating as a “router on a stick” currently, I use an Aruba 2920 switch to achieve this but can also be done with usb Ethernet adapters.
I hear MicoTik has some good cheap hardware and is extremely powerful router capable of the same things at reasonable price, but my openwrt has worked for me for many years.
OPNsense running on a 4 port Protectli. I use 2 ports for WAN connections with load balancing. I have it set to failover to using just one if there is packet loss or high latency on the other.
A pile of shame, consisting of all the books I bought and haven't read yet.
I run two pfsense routers and use CARP. 1gbps/50 cable modem with 5 static ips available on both pfsenses, and a 1 gbps symmetrical FTTH with 1 static ip also available on both pfsenses (but uses CARP to know which is “live” - it uses pppoe, which makes this possible with 1 ip).
My current single point of failure is my single main switch. Works very well though. I’ve had 100% uptime for over a year!
Cellular router with failover.
A Raspberry Pi with two network interfaces (one can be a USB-to-Ethernet or USB-to-WiFi adapter) can be set up as a failover router. Just write scripts to check the internet connectivity regularly and switch between connections as needed.
My EdgeRouter 4 does a good job of load-balancing two internet connections. Just a couple of PBR lines in the config and it was working.
The only time my network is down is when the power is out
Go outside and do yardwork. Play with the dog. Read a book. Wait for the ISP to fix their shit.
Main ISP is fiber, house is part of HOA that has cable internet included, so that is my failover.
Main is 2gbps symmetrical
Failover is 300 down, 10 up
100% up time obviously
My router is x86 linux, so I can just usb tether to my phone like a frugal king.
One of those travel routers sharing the connection from my neighbors Xfinity Hotspot ($20/mnth) as my second uplink to my main fiber
I use an cheap EdgeRouterX to detect failover events then route all traffic out secondary WAN (Teltonika 4G) and I have a nice failover script where I get notified via pushover of the events.
A $30 GL.iNET Opal router tethered to my cell phone. Plugged a cable from a LAN port of the Opal to the WAN or WAN2 of my pfSense router.
If the Opal is plugged in WAN2 all the time you could have pfSense do automatic failover that is seamless.
Fail over? Cry and smoke some weed until it comes back on.
Mikrotik do inexpensive routers and their RouterOS is wonderful.
It can even do connection-based load balancing over two connections, although I don't have the mastery to set this up yet.
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