logoalt Hacker News

dagmxtoday at 8:01 AM6 repliesview on HN

The fallback support for UniFi setups will be awesome.

I’m honestly tempted to get it for my house. My ISP downtime is pretty low but it does happen every once in a while, at the most inopportune times, which impedes working from home.

Having a wireless backup would hopefully cover those downtimes


Replies

sschuellertoday at 9:14 AM

I have a wireless backup[1] using Vyos[2] and a 5G router provided for free by the 5G service provider for those rare moments when both fiber links are dead.

At the same time I would never recommend anyone get 5G internet as their primary service if you have other options and especially not from one of these cheap providers.

[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/

[2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vyos-router-update/#wan-f...

show 2 replies
sgarlandtoday at 1:07 PM

Forgive me, I didn’t watch the videos: is that what the Dream Router supports - normal wired WAN uplink, plus 5G failover? If so, yes, that’s very attractive.

I have a T-Mobile backup home internet plan, and when I had a rack set up, it was my failover from fiber. The Dream Machine Pro did auto failover and failback flawlessly. However, I recently moved, and am redoing my homelab so I have no rack right now; internet is from a Dream Router, so I don’t have auto-failover. I doubt I’d buy this for the small window of time I expect to be in this situation, but if you didn’t have or want a rack, an AIO with failover would be great.

show 1 reply
killingtime74today at 8:45 AM

I used to do that. Now I use starlink as backup

show 1 reply
ansgritoday at 8:55 AM

There are now quite a few options for wifi APs with cellular backup. I use TP-Link, and it's ok for the price, I guess, and supports adding OneMesh range extenders.

The problem with this setup for me is that it doesn't work with uplink that sometimes becomes unstable yet nominally working, and in general LTE fallback triggers slowly.

Are there any prosumer-friendly options for connection bundling, which can balance uplinks continuously?

qwerpytoday at 8:10 AM

We had a 5 day power outage (Bellevue WA, not exactly in the middle of nowhere) and after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped. I had backup power but no internet. On the way back from Best Buy with my new starlink, everything came back online of course. But now I’m ready for the next multi day outage.

I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.

show 2 replies
bottotoday at 8:03 AM

Yeah, the fact you can use any of the ports on a dream machine as a WAN (its not optimal, but is an option) makes it really easy to have a couple of fallbacks if you really need high redundancy.