How does one build redundancy in home wifi setting?

Question

Working a home I recently had a scare where my wifi router took yanked us all offline for several hours. Work time lost, school quizzes nearly missed, etc... Did I mention I have two teenagers at home all day?

So now in the #workfromhome world how does one build a level of redundancy in our home network. If there is a router failure, I don't want to have to wait days until I try to revive it or decide to go buy another one.

I don't want to buy another router and have it sit idle until it is obsolete technology or is needed, I want to keep the connection alive when one router fails. Just like I have set up my computers with mirror drives so when one fails I keep going on one disk until I replace.

So how do you build a redundant home network capable of keeping us connected? Or does it always come down to one device controlling everything?

I know a lot about PCs and very little about networks. I have 2 hard wired PCs, 1 wired NAS, and about 14 other wireless gizmos. I gave an AC3000 mesh router with 1 satellite (although I don't know what that spec means). My pipeline is a coaxial cable attached to a cable modem serving out 1 ethernet connection.

Answer 1

I wonder if your expectations are realistic. Having a second router on standby is going to be a way cheaper solution then the alternatives. You could likely get a second hand router for well less then US$50.

My "Plan B" is to use my cellphone as a wireless hotspot. I have enough data banked up that this is realistic (provided I am at home - not much of a problem during a lockdown). It is likely not that difficult to turn off your router, turn on your cellphone hotspot and configure it to use the same password as your router one - although this solution has drawbacks - particularly you don't want to risk having both running together.

If you want to have a more complex setup, with multiple Internet connections, the easiest way would be to have 2 networks which don't overlap and have devices connect to their preferred network. This does waste WIFI spectrum and could cause issues for things like shared printers.

Edging further up the complexity system would be 2 routers, with carefully curated DHCP servers (or run your home network on a static IP address), ensuring both routers are on the same subnet, but with different gateways and connected on the same LAN. For DHCP you would need to go through hoops of setting up some kind of failover system such that there is only 1 DHCP server answering for any address.

Alternatively, 2 networks with routing between them. This is quite doable with decent equipment, but not so much with SOHO equipment. If you are in a possition to use DD-WRT or equivalent, and you have the technical skills, you could run 2 networks and then join then route between them.

Answer 2

I realise this post is several months old, but I've also invested in a dual WAN setup at home since I've nearly been working at home a year now and my local cable provider has very regular outages/slowness etc, but when it works, it's amazingly fast. But when you have no internet, you can't work and as a contractor that means I don't get paid.

So I found a 4G router being sold with an unlimited data SIM by a network in the UK called three and it was pretty cheap. I already have cable internet. So I built a pfSense firewall (free software) and bought a 4 port gigabit network card for very cheap.

I've now got my home setup such that if my main internet connection dies, or has packet loss, it will swap over to the 4G connection (in around about 1-2 seconds) and all the devices in the house use that without reconfiguring anything you just have to wait a couple of seconds and normal service is resumed.

I don't have to do anything special in terms of DHCP, one DHCP server (the pfSense box) hands out all my IP addresses then pfSense figures out which gateway to send the traffic to.

Now I can suffer the loss of either WAN link and still be online. I used an old computer from 5 years ago as the router, and I paid around about £50 (about $70 USD) for the 4 port gigabit card. My WiFi also routes to pfSense so all wireless devices continue to work. It's very much set and forget too, I like to poke around at it but equally i've left it for months at a time without having to do anything (and i've never ever had to reset it).

There are of course hardware routers that can do failover/multi-wan. I've used the edgerouter-x ($60 gigabit router with 5 ports) and it has pretty good failover too, you could do the same here with one ISP in one ethernet port and another ISP / 4G in the other.

Answer 3

You can build it that way - though I'd recommend keeping as simple as possible.

That said, if you wanted reliability - you'd find looking at non consumer hardware is a great idea - since they have better management tools

In my experience, typically single purpose modems or ONTs are easier to maintain and robust over modem-router

I also separate my router (I built my own), modem and APs - to some extent, this means you can swap out any component. There's some pro-sumer routers - mikrotik and ubiquiti come to mind that kinda both give you better hardware and software, while not being rediculously expensive.

As far as APs go, I found a set that does mesh on wire and wireless backhaul (which is nice). Having seperate dedicated APs would be an option as well - I was debating this but my specific setup made mesh a better option. Since my mesh APs can act as routers, this also means that if my router died, I could quickly repurpose one of them as a router with one configuration change and a swapped cable.

I also keep all my crappy old routers. In case