How to set up a reliable backup internet connection
Primary internet outages can leave businesses completely disconnected when backup lines share the same physical path or suffer from spotty cellular service. Choosing a true redundant solution like Starlink or cellular requires careful configuration to avoid hardware issues, such as NAT limitations that cause unexpected drops.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Using Starlink as a secondary or failover connectionDid this help you?
- 2Deploying cellular (LTE/4G/5G) data plans or backup modemsDid this help you?
- 3Configuring multi-WAN setups with SD-WAN and automated failover rulesDid this help you?
- 4Demanding diverse physical routing from primary internet service providersDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Our primary internet connection is two 10 Gbps fibers. They recently *both* got cut, and we were without a connection for about 4 hours. Thankfully, that is an unusual situation, but it has still made us start thinking about another backup solution.”source ↗
“Our primary line is through AT&T, and turns out our secondary line rides from the same nodes down the same path leased from AT&T as well ….”source ↗
“We started with Verizon but found that some of our warehouses had spotty service and the connections were unreliable.”source ↗
“Only issue had was when Starlinks are not in bypass mode, the amount of clients can cause NAT issues which requires Starlink to be rebooted.”source ↗
Where this came up
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