A bit late to this, but I have a little experience here that might be useful. I'm quite rural with no practical adsl or cable chances. (2mbit/0.768kbit on adsl, 22 years on)
As a secondary internet link, I have a Mikrotik RBSXTR&R11e-LTE6 direction 4g modem, which works very well. I typically get around 30mbit down and 10 up, but this seems to be quite contentious as it varies a lot at peak times. (A carrier issue, not the hardware)
The dongle type 3g/4g/5g adapters (aka "Soap on a rope") are good for emergency and portable use, but a directional router like the Mikrotik, or in weak signal areas, with an additional directional aerial, are much more reliable where you have the luxury of a building to fix it to. Mine's mounted inside my roof space as the unit isn't fully weather sealed.
My primary link is a regional wifi mesh offering by Cloud Wireleess which works very well, but occasionally it drops out and with two of us WFH, I'm happier having a backup. Both are affected by weather conditions, but not as much as you might think.
I run automatic failover/failback by putting a linux box as the gateway, which then manages upward routing using WFS to detect failure. If my primary link goes down, it'll switch routing to the secondary within a few seconds, then fail back once the primary returns (I have the luxury of two debian servers at home so I've made this high availability by using keepalived and a virtual ip, and replicating services on both)
On sims and contracts: DO check the carrier is good for your area.
3 and its resellers (Like Smarty) seem to have the cheapest deals, but the coverage for me is terrible and on my initial testings, I barely got a single bar and throughput was a few hundred kbps. Their coverage maps for Devon seem quite patchy.
O2 have a much better signal for me, and I have a Giffgaff sim.
Giles Coochey
wrote:
>
Always check the small print, many
of these still have "fair usage" clauses in the contract,
I endorse this point. Giffgaff's "unlimited deal" has this to say, and this can be crippling if you're using it for work. And Giffgaff are one of the more transparent providers.
"If you have an ‘Always On’ allowance, then after 80 GB of data used
you'll experience a reduced data speed of 384kbps from 8am to Midnight.
You may notice that activities which require high amounts of data, like
HD video streaming, will be slower. Traffic Flow applies."
If anyone knows of a truly unlimited sim deal on the O2 network for sensible money, please clue me in!
S
