Morning,

We have a Vigor 2860n router at work which we use for wireless internet access and provides a LAN connection to our switch and server.

The internet connection inbound to the WAN is very temperamental and drops frequently causing us lots of problems.
The connection is a site to site wireless connection - i.e we don't have a hard line in, we piggy back off some sort of long range wireless connection from an adjoining business a few hundred meters away.

My question is, in the event we lose inbound internet, is there a simple way of connecting a mobile phone with 4G/5G to provide internet?
Either by plugging the mobile phone into one of the USB ports on the router, or getting some kind of bridge or adapter out of the charger socket on the phone and into the WAN port on the router?

The internet connection is dire, and while a more permanent solution is being resolved, ie a hard line in, I need to find a way to keep internet into the business when our current set up fails. We get reasonable mobile 4G signal and the business isn't overly internet heavy so this could provide a decent backup. It might even be better than our current connection!


Thanks in advance.

Are you saying that you already use the facility to set WAN2 as "wireless" mode rather than ethernet to get your main internet connection?

If not, then why not just use that to connect to your phone's hotspot?

The last time we had an internet outage I hooked up a USB-C hub to my phone (Pixel 4) with power and an additional USB-C NIC, from that via Ethernet to the WAN 2 port of the 2860. Worked beautifully for a day. Hardest things was to reconfigure the connection to the previous modem.

I've used the "wireless WAN" feature to great effect with my Samsung S8 and a Vigor 2860ac (now 2865ac) that's stuck with ADSL.

To do that, I set WAN2's mode to Wireless WAN and connected the router to my phone's Mobile Hotspot wireless. On the 2860 it's shared with WAN2, but the 2862/6 have dedicated wireless WAN interfaces.

The throughput I get with it is usually over 20mbps and I think that's actually likely to be throttled by the mobile ISP since it can peak much higher sometimes.
I don't use it all the time though, so I just turn off Mobile Hotspot on the phone. Then when I want some more bandwidth I just turn on Mobile Hotspot and the router connects to it on WAN2 and starts using it to load balance.

markus.schloesser wrote:
The last time we had an internet outage I hooked up a USB-C hub to my phone (Pixel 4) with power and an additional USB-C NIC, from that via Ethernet to the WAN 2 port of the 2860. Worked beautifully for a day. Hardest things was to reconfigure the connection to the previous modem.

That's a great way of doing it too I've used one of those little mini routers with OpenWRT as a Wireless > Ethernet bridge as well.