Thread: 3G Wireless Routers

I have a customer with a small office of 7 staff. They have recently had an outage of 2 days on their BT phone line after a digger decided to dig it up from the road outside.

The survived only by virtue of mobile telephones and me hooking them up with a t-mobile 3G USB modem and thankfully remembering how to do ICS with a USB modem.

Now they want me to set this up as a constant fallback option for if they ever loose connectivity again. Now I have been investigating the use of a 3G wireless router which I can plug in to their network as an practically instant failover device.

Does anyone have any recomendations or experience with this type of kit? Any makes to definately stay away from?

I've used Vodafone/Linksys's 3G router with excellent results. Where I've needed to put broadband into a site before we could get ADSL in (i.e. "we need it tomorrow") it's worked really well. The router we used also had an ethernet connection so you could use just one router and "fail over" to 3G when you lose the ADSL just by pressing a button.

Some of the Draytek Vigor ADSL routers recently got firmware upgrades so as to allow you to use the USB port (usually used for an in-built print server) as a port for a USB 3G modem. It even supports automated failover from ADSL.

There is a WIC available for Cisco, but I've not personally tried/tested this out.

I like the sound of the Draytek. Will look in to that, thanks.

I've seen references to D-link doing a 3G router, uses a cardbus slot for a 3G data card. Handy as you can upgrade the 3G performance and networks without needing a new router but I've not seen any for sale in the UK.

I believe you can also achieve this with a SonicWall nowadays and doing active failover based on probing.

Thanks for digging up an old thread

The drayteks are what I have used thanks.

Depending on budget have a look at the 3G Phoebus over at Expansys or a Dual SIM Sarian Systems HSUPA router for £500ish.

I have used both for various applications and I would recommend the Sarian kit as it is extremely robust.

Stuart

I've never tried anything apart from the Linksys WRT54G-3G which worked cracking for us. It was only a temporary week event in a field. Where we had this in a portacabin, and a p2p wireless link with Mikrotik's back to a local AP.

Originally Posted by alex_xifos

I've never tried anything apart from the Linksys WRT54G-3G which worked cracking for us. It was only a temporary week event in a field. Where we had this in a portacabin, and a p2p wireless link with Mikrotik's back to a local AP.

Digging up old threads asside, it's nice to see someone else that uses Mikrotik kit. Bloody fantastic for any kind of pro wi-fi setup!

Yup so do we. Customer LLs and such. We have quite a number of them and I have to say top kit. It is a shame no one has cranked out a "consumer friendly" pretty plastic case for them rather than the stamped metal ones. Otherwise I would be using far more in place of HP and other similar customer APs.

Oh and back to raking up the old thead, Billion have just rolled a combined ADSL2+ and 3G router, which according to PCR mag is going to be in the order of £75... Now that isn't bad IMO..

I've just ordered a Billion BiPAC 7300GX 3G ADSL2+. Having the 12V adaptor really interested me too as I can easily hook it up to my solar stuff - will let you know how I get on.

ChrisB.