My typically rock-solid home internet connection went down a few days ago. No fault of the ISP, but we had a fiber “cut” – more like snap, as I think the overhead cable got caught on a passing truck, shooting it half a block. Sadly, the earliest time they could get a service tech out to string some new fiber was as week later.
My GoogleFi tethering worked great for a few days with my work machine to get me through the wee, but it really wasn’t a great solution for anyone other than me. Also, at 25GB without any great way to add more, I started looking for other solutions (turns out video calls burn through the GBs).
The first thing that came to mind was something like getting T-mobile home internet for a month, or some sort of hotspot. That would definitely be a short term solution and not something I’d keep running all the time. Ick to more monthly fees for something I’ve needed less than 5 times in as many years. What I really needed was a preloaded block of data on a SIM card – something that seems to be easily found in the EU, but not so easily found in the US.
And then I stumbled upon IOT sim cards – thanks Amazon. While not perfect, as the data does expire, these are a great way to only really pay for what you need in that time frame.
Knowing my pfsense router can do failover for multiple WANs, I purchased an unlocked refurbished Nighthawk M6 Pro (I wanted 5G LTE instead of 4G), and a 1GB EIOTCLUB SIM card.
Setup of the M6 Pro was a breeze.
- Remove the battery & plug it into the UPS (apparently more power when not on battery)
- Factory reset it
- Check for updates
- Enable the ethernet port (if not already)
- Enable IP Passthrough
- I did not change the APN to what EIOTCLUB says to (americas.bics) as that downgraded me to 4G whereas the default after the factory reset gave me sweet, sweet 5Gs.
Then in pfsense I did the following (thanks Josh):
- Created and enabled a new Interface Assignment named “WAN_LTE” that uses DHCP on IPv4 and blocks reserved networks (both)
- Created a new Gateway tied to that interface, but using 8.8.8.8 as the Monitor IP (default doesn’t work)
- Updated the monitoring intervals to be closer to what Josh has (30 seconds
- Created a new Gateway Group that included both my fiber (Tier 1) and this new LTE gateway (Tier 5)
- Set the default gateway to be the new Gateway Group
And tada! I’m back on the internet throughout my house (outbound only).
With EIOTCLUB’s mobile app, it was super easy to view the current usage and buy a larger block of data. Once this block and outage has expired, I’ll probably get a 1GB for 360 days ($9 as of this writing). That way it can continue to monitor the connection throughout the year, and if something does go down, while manual, it’s very easy to reload the SIM and get back online.
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