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.

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.

I’m using four 8TB IronWolf Pro drives in the Intel-based QNAP used for Plex and general fileshares.

I’m using four 14TB IronWolf Pro drives (with two Samsung 2TB NVMe SSDs for cache) in the dedicated iSCSI ARM-based QNAP.

They’ve been great drives.