Backup internet acces

[Corvl]

What is mysensors when internet fails on you.....

That happened to me today.
I am about 3000 miles away from home , and no connection to my house anymore. I expect my modem gave up ( which happends at least once a year). Or power failure or .....?????? I don't know. Anyway , Internet is not working at my residence. No one is there to take a look or reset.

On my vera 3 I allready have the ping sensor and on the modem a wallplug which resets the modem when the ping sensor is "red". Looking at teamviewer the internet was down arround 0200 AM. that's about the time when vera does a heal.
Maybe the modem was switched off for a reset and during the heal or a vera restart the wallplug has not been switched on. Than it would be a self induced problem, which would not be there without the home automation. Anyway , friday night when I am home I need to investigate, it is very frustrating.

But now , my question; if it is a modem breakdown , automation malfunktion , power failure or internet provider failure , I would like to have an internet backup.

I am thinking arduino which detects if the main internet connection is down ( for more than x minutes) , starts up the backup internet ( thinking of cellphone and prepaid databundle) , sends out a notification and able to do minimum homeauthomation ( in my case connect to vera 3) and capture webcam streams and sends out periodic images.

Anyone allready has something like that or has an idea how to set this up? if it is even possible?

thanks,
Cor

[andriej]

I would look for OpenWRT router, which could do the job.
On Aliexpress there's Nexx WT3020 - small, USB powered router with USB port.

It can handle normal WAN connection up to 100mbit and you could plug USB modem which could detect the outage and switch itself.

[tbowmo]

What about implementing it on the router itself? If you have a openwrt based router, it should be easy to make a backup connection, that kicks in when the main line is down.

Then it's also transparent to everything else in the house (ip cameras, vera etc).

I have thought about something like the above, but my connection very rarely fails. So I don't need the backup right now (actually I do have a cellular usb device with "free" internet, that could be used for that purpose, but don't have the time to set it up or maintain it afterwards).

[GuyP]

I agree, take a look at a better router/firewall. I use pfsense, which can handle any number of WAN connections and run them however you want, failover or load balanced etc.

I'd then run a VPN service to allow reconnect. You could use dynamic DNS to allow you to connect to the dynamic one from the Mobile network.