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WAN routers with 4G/5G Failover

stuartm19

Member
New to the forum, apologies if this question has been asked and answered elsewhere. I searched but couldn't find anything recent or relevant. I also apologise for the length of this post!

I'm moving to a new rural property where a fixed line connection is non-existent, however I'm a software engineer working from home and need a reliable and reasonable connection at all times. I'm opting for Starlink as the primary connectivity but I need a 4G/5G backup for the times when Starlink's current coverage causes drop-outs.

The issue is that I'm not finding a lot of routers that support automatic failover to 4G/5G and which don't compromise significantly on the other router features. In particular external antenna connections are a MUST - the property has 2 foot thick red sandstone walls, it's essentially a giant Faraday cage. Mast mounted antennas are the only way to go. It's worth noting that I'm not looking for overall best performance here, while that would be nice to have, functionality trumps over squeezing out a few extra Mbps.

So far in my research, only the two Netgear 4G options seem to fit the criteria and of those, the Orbi (LBR20) seems like the better option as I want/need mesh wifi on the interior. I don't need the wifi to be provided by the router but obviously there may be some overall cost benefit if it is included. I don't hate Netgear, but I do wonder if I'm missing a better alternative?

I've been told by someone that the Huawai CPE Pro 2 is the way to go, with an external antenna modification however I check and Huawai have explicitly said their device does NOT support failover. So for me that's a non-starter, besides which, the price, the voided warranty as a result of modification and dozens of user comments about features disappearing with firmware updates has given me zero confidence in that hardware.

I'm willing to consider hardware that can be flashed with open source firmware to provide a failover option, if it meets the requirements, however this would need to be a reliable/stable option. I'm perfectly capable of managing such a solution, it's just that I don't want to be wasting my weekends/free time fighting to keep things working.

Lastly, I'm also certain that some combination of enterprise grade equipment could provide what I want. However I'm not willing to spend thousands when there is consumer grade hardware that is 'good enough' for a fraction of the cost.

If you managed to make it through all of that and have some suggestions I would be very happy to hear from you!
 
Hello,

If you are very rural, then I would not bother spending many hundreds of pounds on Huawei CPE Pro, alas it'll take a long time for 5G to reach you.
It really depends a lot on your location, how far are the mobile masts etc.
Care to share a post code?

You could go for something like this:
https://mikrotik.com/product/sxt_lte6_kit or
https://mikrotik.com/product/lhg_lte6_kit

About load balancing, I think it's best to use a proper router that can do load balancing/failover, ie do not rely on the starlink or LTE router to do it.
There are quite a few from Draytek, Linksys and even a Rpi4 with OpenWRT could do it.
 
Thanks for the rapid response. I'm not banking on the 5G, I know that it will take time and may ultimately never reach me however if I can future-proof now without spending much more I will.

Such is the nature of the location, that a postcode more or less identifies the actual address which I'd rather not do in a public forum. However I have identified the nearest mast using cellmapper.net and it lies 1.8 miles away - slightly downhill and with no terrain obstructions. The mast is shared by EE [Bands 3 & 20] / Three [Band 3]. So not too bad considering ...

As far as antenna - I had planned to use a Poynting XPOL-2 Uni-directional v3. However those combined antenna/modem units from Microtik do look very interesting and stupidly cheap. This has definitely given me something to think about ...

Yes, given the existence of units like those Microtik ones, maybe the better route to go would be to have a separate router with dual WAN instead. The RPi may not even be the worst idea, at least for initial deployment and testing, I already have my VPN and DNS on an RPi.
 
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I use a Draytek 2925 but there are newer models, it has 2 WANs each of which I connect to a 4G router in the eaves of the attached workshop via 25m long Cat6 cables leaving the 4G routers with short cables to external antenna. I line balance them but equally you could have one WAN to the starlink and failover to WAN2 with a 4G router.
 
In my view something running pfsense would be a nice option. Leaves many more options to much more expansion with decent VPN support, squid proxy, security/ad filtering plus loads more stuff plus if you run them on the right hardware gigabit plus connection speeds wont trouble it in the slightest.
You can build them cheaply enough from old hardware or use a thin client/nuc style box or even those dedicated router hardware boxes all over ebay/amazon. Can spec them with as many ports as you need for WAN too. I can't fault mine, easily performs as well as the Sonicwalls/Sophos stuff I use at work and for a fraction of the cost.
 
I use a Draytek 2925 but there are newer models, it has 2 WANs each

Thanks, will take a look at the Draytek models.

In my view something running pfsense would be a nice option.

I have friends who absolutely swear by pfsense. I've shyed away from it in the past only because I did the whole 'build your own router' thing 15 years ago and while it worked fine for several years, it was just time consuming. However I will concede that the likes of pfsense have likely made things much easier compared to my early experiments with iptables, DHCP and bind caching dns servers. My power bill was also a big factor, as the hardware I used was hardly 'low power'.

I'm not really looking for a new project, I have plenty on the go already, but I will look at what pfsense offers in 2021. Maybe a pre-built option with pfsense would give me the features I want without the time investment.
 
Thanks, will take a look at the Draytek models.



I have friends who absolutely swear by pfsense. I've shyed away from it in the past only because I did the whole 'build your own router' thing 15 years ago and while it worked fine for several years, it was just time consuming. However I will concede that the likes of pfsense have likely made things much easier compared to my early experiments with iptables, DHCP and bind caching dns servers. My power bill was also a big factor, as the hardware I used was hardly 'low power'.

I'm not really looking for a new project, I have plenty on the go already, but I will look at what pfsense offers in 2021. Maybe a pre-built option with pfsense would give me the features I want without the time investment.

Thats the only issue with it in my eyes, its cheap to build and once setup isnt too difficult to use (though that all depends on how far you go with it) however using old x86 hardware over time will negate any cost saving rather than buying more expensive power-frugal hardware in the first place.
netgate make their own dedicated hardware now but you can get still get low power hardware more cheaply at the expense of build time.
 
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Had problem with Pfsense/Opnsense, no matter what I tried it wouldn't get an IP from a Huawei CPE Win in bridge mode.
Replaced it with Debian, everything worked out of the box.
 
Had problem with Pfsense/Opnsense, no matter what I tried it wouldn't get an IP from a Huawei CPE Win in bridge mode.
Replaced it with Debian, everything worked out of the box.
thats quite an odd one, what network cards/hardware were you using in pfsense?
the only bug I had a while back was Port fowarding with dual WAN connections, upgraded to 2.5.1 at the time if you port forwarding would only work on one WAN port. Think its been patched though now, and not a big deal for me now as I went to CGNAT smarty anyway
 
I am running an old Celeron NUC, single NIC, but my 2 uplinks come in 2 vlans. On the non-bridge-mode vlan interface (EE CGNAT tethering) the DHCP client would work without problems, on the bridge-mode vlan it would fail to get an IP. Tried to change all the settings that I could, to no avail.
In the end vanilla Linux does everything I need to do, albeit with a bit more elbow grease.
 
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