[SOLVED] How to create backup network or increase bandwidth

[rejwan98]

Hi, my current home at the moment has fibre maxed out at 80mbps, i have tried different providers and all are decent but i do run into a lot of line issues which stops my broadband for a while (applies to 3 different providers i have tried), the past month i got a contract for 5g with three which gives speeds of 400mbps plus via their Huawei 5g CPE modem, i was wondering if there is anyway to combine both my fibre and 5g networks to make it one, ie the 5g as backup or as additional bandwidth via the same access point, i have a lot of smart home devices which all are affected if i my network stops, so was looking for a solution. I'm happy to spend some money on hardware if required but need pointing in the right direction.

Only reason im not looking to use the 5g as main is due to latency issues for online gaming.

I'd like to add that the Huawei 5g CPE has 2 ethernet ports one of which is labled as WAN if that helps

Thanks, Any input will be much appreciated

 

[bill001g]

Short answer is you are not going to be able to combine them but you might use it as a backup if the main one fails.

First what is eating 80mbps of bandwidth. That is a lot to be using. You first goal should be try to find what is using all that bandwidth and see if there is a way to reduce it.

I am also somewhat surprised you can get 400mbps on 5g. You must live in area that has actual 5g. They seem to have some technical issue and have not rolled out a lot of this. Most things you see called 5G are fakes where they just renamed a more advanced for of 4g lte 5g.\

So the main problem you have is the 2 different internet connections have different IP addresses. This makes things very complex to try to use both. The example I tend to give is say you log into a game authentication server using ISP1 and then attempt to use some world server using ISP2. The game company will detect this as hacking and at the very minimum close the sessions. If you even try a simple web browser you are going to get constant captcha messages screaming you are a bot.

You can get a dual wan router, most asus routers have the ability. In the simple case you setup the main internet and the router will ping some ip and switch over if the main internet fails. You still have to deal with the ip changing, sometime you must relog in and other you need to reload the page.

Now if you are careful you could use one ISP for some applications and the other for other applications. It tends to be very messy if you try to do too much. You must key in lists of IP addresses to things like this.

BUT 80mbps is a huge amount of bandwidth to be using all the time. I can see if you have a big download now and then but to have it constantly used is strange. You can use QoS to a point to fix a download but if you have someone running large torrent stuff you can't fix that since it is designed to get past limitations.

 

[rejwan98]

thanks for the great response, 80mbps is almost enough, but in a house where 2+ ps5s downloading a new game, and multiple tvs with netflix running it does cause issues. i think the backup also works for me if its all via 1 access point since my main priority is ensuring my smart cam, doorbells etc stay connected 24/7.


I attached an image of the speedtest just now for the 5g, the speed fluctuates but averages around 350/400 majority of the time, i am very close to central london and 5g works great on my phone via ee and three which i heard is supposed to be the best. 5g three image


Only question is would this be seamless enough in which i would not have to do anything and the cams, doorbell etc will stay connected albeit with a brief interuption atleast till my fibre line is stable again and if so whats the best router/any additional hardware i can use to make this happen. Thanks

 

[bill001g]

It should in theory but id depends on the application. It would depend for example if some server on the internet retained the old IP for a bit.....you would get the equivalent of already logged in messages. There is no way to say for sure but in general it will switch over.

I would read the doc on asus site. Their routers run the same software on almost all models so it is not one particular router. See if this will be good enough. You might consider loading the merlin firmware but I have not compared to see if it has better features. Asus takes the best things from merlin over time and puts it in the main version.

What is tricky is what does "down" mean. Things like ethernet ports never really go down when there is a modem in between. Then you start to use ping commands to detect outage but is missing a single ping mean its down, at what level is it considered down. One switches too quickly and the other maybe too slow. This is about the best you can hope for on a consumer connection. This is the whole reason they invented routing protocols that run on real routers. These can switch in fractions of a second or if it is the internet where they don't want it swapping back and forth a lot it can take up to 3 full minutes to switch over.

 

[SamirD]

I've dealt with situations like yours before and with multiple isps. If you want to spend some bucks, go with a peplink solution as they can truly bond multiple connections together. Otherwise, you can try almost any of the multi-wan routers out there, but I would lean towards the one designed for the enterprise and business where multi-wan is already a core feature, not an afterthought.

You may also consider simply making two separate networks, one for the iot devices that need 24x7 connection and give them a line and then have another connection for the rest of the house. You can also get fancy with vlans and multi-wan on enterprise routers that will let you specify a lot of the 'path' for whatever you want.