Hi all,

I’m looking into a 4G router as a backup for our leased line fibre connection, I’m wondering whether I need to go for a modem or router option? Recently we had a couple of power outages of only 1-2 mins within a 15 min period. After the 2nd power cut our leased line wouldn't connect back, turns out something at the BT exchange needed manually resetting by an engineer which was done but took around 3 hrs to figure out because BT initially told us that it was a problem at our end not theirs.

So, in that 3 hours I tried and failed to tether a mobile phone to a laptop and route into the draytek via ethernet as a stop gap until we got our line back up and running. This has now steered me down a dedicated 4G failover backup plan, here's what I've found so far...

The options are a modem connected by USB, Teltonika TRM 240 https://www.forestrock.co.uk/product/teltonika-rut240/
Or
The router variant Teltonika RUT240 https://www.forestrock.co.uk/product/teltonika-rut240/

I’m guessing the router version would be best so I can patch the RJ45 directly into WAN3 to help with redundancy and being able to set it up to use when the leased line isn’t available? I will probably set everything up so it’s working then pull the ethernet from the 4G router and we will plug back in manually if ever there’s an outage so we don’t rack up costs from the 4G sim until we need to use it.

I can’t seem to find any examples of Draytek users configuring a 3910 with either of these options. This is the first time I’ve looked into this so not sure if I’m going down the best route here?

No 5G anywhere close to the office as we are miles away from the nearest town, we can get 4G signal (although not in the server room) so I’m also looking at this antenna QuMax https://www.forestrock.co.uk/product/qumax-for-teltonika-rut240-230/

If anyone has any advice or recommendations and what I should go with. The owner of the business isn’t bothered about redundancy for the leased line and can’t see the value in a failover system 🤦

I think given the relatively low cost of adding this paired with a PAYG data sim for the rare time we could have an outage would be beneficial and worth doing for £300 ($400).

Any advice welcome

Bob

I used https://mikrotik.com/product/sxt_lte_kit with my 3910 for quite some time until FTTP came my way.
Reliable and can be fed from single power over ethernet, also had mine outside on exposed wall for about a year without any issues.

Thanks for the reply rolandrat,

looks like I need to figure out what network provider I shall be going with first as they all seem to use differnet bands. The one you used also caters for band 20 (800MHz) which seems to be the default for the UK so I'll look into that option,

cheers

Bob

You also need to work out how much bandwidth they have on the band as it varies by network and by which tower you connect to. The Mikrotek does let you fix to a band which I found very helpful as it prevents dropping to a different band with less throughput for example.
Use https://www.cellmapper.net/ to see where your cell towers are and whats available on them.