I'm after some general advice from anyone who has looked into this before.
I work from home full-time and therefore rely on having a stable Internet connection. I've had my current fibre broadband service for over two years and it's been rock-solid until this morning, when it suffered its first extended outage when planned overnight maintenance overran.
I use a FreeBSD small form factor PC with six ethernet ports as my Internet gateway/router, with one port connected to the fibre ONT and running mpd5(8) to establish a PPPoE session with the ISP, other ports connected to my LANs, and IPv4 NAT and IPv6 routing being done by pf(4). When the outage occurred, I enabled USB tethering on my Android phone and connected it to the router, appearing as a ue0 interface in FreeBSD. I simply ran dhclient(8) on that interface, it got a private 192.168.169.0/24 address, then I substituted 'ue0' for 'pppoe0' in pf's $WAN_IF macro, reloaded rules, then my home network had Internet again. Fairly straightforward, but quite manual and introduces double-NAT.
I'm now thinking about how I might instead use a 4G/LTE USB dongle connected permanently to the gateway system and have Internet service failover automatically when the PPPoE session via the fibre ONT goes down. From the research I've done so far, it appears that such dongles are handled by the u3g(4) driver and present as a USB-to-serial device which is controlled using the AT command set, like old-school analogue modems. It looks like mpd5 would be able use such a modem as another link device and handle failover when necessary. The problem is I haven't the faintest idea what AT command sequence would be required to establish a 4G connection with a mobile network operator and my searching the web hasn't turned up anything super useful yet.
Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing and can give any pointers? Even if it's not specific to any UK mobile network operator, any information may be helpful.
I work from home full-time and therefore rely on having a stable Internet connection. I've had my current fibre broadband service for over two years and it's been rock-solid until this morning, when it suffered its first extended outage when planned overnight maintenance overran.
I use a FreeBSD small form factor PC with six ethernet ports as my Internet gateway/router, with one port connected to the fibre ONT and running mpd5(8) to establish a PPPoE session with the ISP, other ports connected to my LANs, and IPv4 NAT and IPv6 routing being done by pf(4). When the outage occurred, I enabled USB tethering on my Android phone and connected it to the router, appearing as a ue0 interface in FreeBSD. I simply ran dhclient(8) on that interface, it got a private 192.168.169.0/24 address, then I substituted 'ue0' for 'pppoe0' in pf's $WAN_IF macro, reloaded rules, then my home network had Internet again. Fairly straightforward, but quite manual and introduces double-NAT.
I'm now thinking about how I might instead use a 4G/LTE USB dongle connected permanently to the gateway system and have Internet service failover automatically when the PPPoE session via the fibre ONT goes down. From the research I've done so far, it appears that such dongles are handled by the u3g(4) driver and present as a USB-to-serial device which is controlled using the AT command set, like old-school analogue modems. It looks like mpd5 would be able use such a modem as another link device and handle failover when necessary. The problem is I haven't the faintest idea what AT command sequence would be required to establish a 4G connection with a mobile network operator and my searching the web hasn't turned up anything super useful yet.
Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing and can give any pointers? Even if it's not specific to any UK mobile network operator, any information may be helpful.
