I work from home full time so I’m reliant on a stable broadband connection to be able to do my job. Today my fibre broadband connection had it’s first outages during my working hours, thankfully only brief ones, but it got me thinking about setting up a backup connection in the case of longer outages in the future. I’m thinking something LTE based.

I run my own FreeBSD-based router on a mini PC with six gigabit ports. My fibre connection terminates in an ONT, so I just connect one of the router ports to that and tell my PPPoE client to use that port as the uplink port. It works well.

Ideally, any backup connection would run through the same router, with some kind of service running to monitor connectivity on the main fibre connection and failing over to the backup connection automatically when IP connectivity is lost.

I can think of a few options:

• Obtain a USB LTE dongle or mini-PCIe LTE card that’s supported by FreeBSD, and configure it as another physical device for the PPPoE daemon (mpd5) to use. Link monitoring and failover between connections can possibly be done entirely within mpd5.
• Obtain a 4G modem similar to this and use it in bridge mode so that my router still gets the public WAN IP, avoiding double-NAT.
• Cheapy option: Use one of my old Android handsets with USB tethering enabled and connect it to the router. Drawback of this is double-NAT; once on the phone and once on the router.

Has anyone else here investigated backup broadband connectivity for their home network and can give any advice or describe their setup?