I was doing a bit of research into having a dongle 4g internet back up for using either on my desktop PC or laptop in case my main internet connection goes down. I would want the connection to be automatically established immediately if there is a drop out on the main connection. After explaining potential issues with router and dongle hardware compatibility, the poster, “bill001g” on the website below provided the following information:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/i ... outer.htmlNow once you get that all figured out the hard problem is how do you do it automatically. They switch really well if you were to unplug the eterrnet cable, but that is not how the internet normally goes down. This also gets into what does "down" mean. What happens if you can get to some internet location but not the ones you really need or you are getting data loss that makes it very slow but it barely functions.
A number of these routers you can give it a ip address to ping to check if the network is up but that is about the best you are going to see. Now if you run third party firmware there are a bunch of scripts people have written to test different things. This option though is not for beginners
You will likely many times have to force it to move manually in the router config page. In any case because you are using different connection(ie IP addresses) all your sessions including VoIP calls will drop and you will have to reestablish them. So you do not want it switching back and forth if the main connection is going up and down a lot.
So, the potential problems seem to be how the router identifies if the connection is down. I know there are some on here that use dongles on computers as internet backups and was wondering how you get around the problems described above? Is there software available from the dongles that allows the user to program a trigger that:
“Activate dongle internet back up if main connection drops for x# of seconds” and
“De-activate dongle internet back up if main connection re-establishes for x# of seconds”?
Does anyone run any type of "third party firmware" to test connections etc in conjunction with a 4g dongle?
Are there any other pitfalls?
Would appreciate any advice before buying any hardware. Thanks in advance.