Satellite Internet As Back Up w/Dual WAN Router

Occasionally I work from home, and with the amount of snow we've received so far this winter, it has been more so then normal. My internet service from Time Warner has always been top notch reliable and completely rock solid, but so far this Winter, snow plows have destroyed the cabling at the pole, not once, not twice but three times. Each time requiring a new line from my tap to the RG11 line that runs into my garage. They have been quick to respond, but with the horrific snow that we received this winter, coupled with the driving bans, it does mean I’m without internet (phone and cable TV) access for a day or two.

Due to the mission critical nature of some of the things I am responsible for at work, I can’t be without internet access, when I work from home. So I need a reliable back up to my 50Mb (actually overprovisioned to 55Mb) cable connection. Verizon does not provide DSL service at my address, there are no WISPs in the area and cellular data is not an option. I live in a rural area. AT&T has no 4G here, T-Mobile has no service here period, Verizon has 4G but due to the distance of where I am from the tower speeds were never that great provided I can maintain a connection and I am currently a Sprint customer, I can get one bar of LTE in my bathroom, that gives me an average of 15Mb down/5Mb up, but once I leave the bathroom, I drop to 1X.

So I’m exploring satellite as an option. Work will reimburse me any and all installation costs and like my normal TWC broadband, they will allow me to expense my back up internet. So essentially this will not cost me a dime. So which sucks less, Hughes or Exede? I am a networking guy, but never played around with setting up and configuring a dual WAN set up. At home I am outfitted with Cisco gear from their Small Business line and have an RV320 router which supports dual WAN load balancing and failover.

1) Which sucks less Hughes Net or Excede? Gen 4 is available in my area and so is Excede according to Wild Blue’s website.

2) I know the latency is outrageous with satellite internet, is the high latency enough to make doing RDP or VNC while connected to my company’s SSL VPN near impossible?

3) With both satellite internet providers if you go over your cap, you’re just slowed down to dial up speeds correct? There are no overages?

4) In a dual WAN failover set up, is it possible to restrict what the secondary internet source can feed and have it restricted somehow by local IP address, MAC address or router port numbers? For example, my four port router feeds my main desktop PC directly, two Cisco SG-200 8 port smart switches in different areas of the house and my Cisco WAP371 wireless access point. If I was in a failover situation and running solely on satellite internet, I would not want smartswitch #2 to have any internet access since that feeds data to all of my home entertainment devices (TV, A/V Receiver, Blu Ray Player, PS4, Xbox One, DirecTV DECA and Genie Go). I don’t really want a chunk of my satellite cap to be chewed up by an Xbox or Playstation update, or me being bone headed and doing something like downloading a game inadvertently. Smart switch #1 just feeds two additional desktop PCs, one which is rarely ever used, and my Philips Hue hockey puck so I don’t care about that and I don’t run a lot my on WIFI other than my two laptops and printer, which would be needed for work purposes if I’m stuck at home.

Does a sat internet solution make sense in my situation? Any other thoughts on the idea?

Thanks for the info, but AT&T has at best 3G service in my area. Years ago, I had an iPhone 3GS on AT&T and usually had no service at home, unless I went outside and then it would flip between HSPA and Edge. I graduated to Android about a year and a half later and that’s when I switched to Sprint, but back then (2010/11) AT&T was just plain awful. A relative of mine has AT&T still and when he comes over he complains about me living in the middle of nowhere because he starts losing his Pandora streaming over his cars Bluetooth from his phone when he gets about two miles from me. I know for a fact there is no real 4G LTE here, not sure about their fake 4G HSPA+ and I know AT&T’s 3G is typically faster than the others but if I can’t get it inside of my house, it’s a moot point.

And yes I’ve heard about the sat providers blocking VPN, but is it all VPN access? Last year at work one of our engineers was at a customer site in the middle of nowhere Minnesota and needed access to our ERP system, so I walked him through the process of downloading the SonicWall Global VPN Client from Dell’s website and gave him the right settings and credentials. He was able to connect without a problem and explore our network to get the installation files for our ERP software and after installation was able to log on to our server while connected to the VPN. I am almost positive he was on a wifi connection via a HughesNet commercial subscription. When he was downloading the SonicWall client and then the ERP set up, I kept asking him how much longer for the file transfer to be complete he said it’s slow since he was on ‘a Hughes wifi satellite’. His words not mine. I have no way of confirming that though. Usually for this stuff I use TeamViewer and just take control, but we only have a certain amount of concurrent licenses and all were being used at the time.

If VPN access is a no go, I guess I could always connect to my work desktop PC via Team Viewer and take control and then use that to VNC into other computers.

I would rather not go cellular with their overages. It was made very clear to me that I would be reimbursed the cost of the service plus hardware rental, if my backup connection has a maximum data allowance, I would have to pay the overages if I exceed them. That’s why I asked about there not being any overages with satellite.

When I was working from home, and my TWC connection was up, I would do about 15-20GB worth of data transfer a day. While TWC doesn’t have usage caps, they do provide a data usage meter on their website and according to that, that’s what I was using a day. Now that is a tad over inflated for work purposes because I would stream a few hours of TWiT.TV in the morning, then listen to Pandora in the afternoon.

While normal HughesNet and Exede plans are heavily capped, the Late Night Free Zone from Midnight to 5 on Exede and the 50GB ‘Bonus Data’ between 2 and 8AM wouldn’t be all that bad. The company I work for is a subsidiary of a company that is based overseas in Europe and there is a 6 hour time differential. A portion of what I do could be done on their schedule and if I plan things right, and if no emergencies occur and could do work arounds. If I’m stuck at home for two or three days under 4 feet of snow, it’s not like I have anything better to do at 3 or 4 in the morning. Also we have people on the west coast of the US, if they need me, with Exede’s unmetered usage beginning at midnight, I could still be in contact with our guys out west, and a not too terribly inconvenient time for them. I could work around a few days with 15-20GB worth of ‘Anytime Data’ and more data in the middle of the night. I could not work around 15-20GB period for the whole month.

If I were to go cellular it would be with Sprint. My router has USB 3G/4G Failover as well. I’d hope the USB stick has slightly better LTE radio in it that would allow me an extra 20 feet of coverage versus my HTC One Max smartphone, or possibly maybe find a 20’ USB extension cable and run it from my router have the USB modem sitting near the bathroom sink. No one has Sprint around here, so even at ~-103 dBm on the 1900 MHz band I can achieve those 15 X 5 speeds. If it wasn’t for being in a market that runs along the Canadian border and IBEZ, I’d be golden with band 26 LTE. Everyone around here has VZW for cellular service, and when I can pick up a 4G signal in my house it’s only 3 or 4 Mb.

I typically only stream two things. Video from an unofficial Windows 8 TWiT.TV app, and then use the magic of DLNA to stream it to my TV, which uses about 750-800MB per hour, and Pandora using my A/V receiver (no stupid ads doing it that way versus using the smartphone and tablet apps). I would assume Pandora streams at a bitrate of 128 Kbps, so that would translate into just under 60MB an hour. That’s roughly 3.5 GB out of 15-20 GB per day that was not used for work related stuff.

I don’t use and never will use stuff like Netflix or Hulu. TWiT, Pandora, an occasional YouTube video and occasionally SiriusXM streaming (when the A/V Receiver is tied up) are the only media I stream. My usage is typically 150-200GB per month of data on my home connection.

Thanks for the added info. And yes, if you think about it please report back about your VPN experience. It would be very much appreciated! I have not made a decision yet. Spring should finally spring sometime next week, don’t have to worry about feet of snow falling in a short timespan until at least November. In the early Fall I’ll start looking into this again with deeper interest. Someone I know from work has a Verizon USB modem. Even though I probably won’t get decent speeds, he’s going to let me borrow it to play with setting up USB cellular failover with my router. If I can get it working, I might see if I can try a Sprint one out. But having the extra data allotments that satellite offers in the middle of the night could work out to be huge.

150Mbps upstream and 30Mbps downstream?

I would have to set this up for dual WAN failover, not load balancing due to the data caps on the satellite side. I watched a few videos on YouTube from Cisco on how to set this up, and it seems easy enough Another problem is I have next to no room on my desk for another device, even as small as a satellite modem

Just a quick update on this. About a month ago I got the new Netgear Fuse mobile hotspot from Sprint. Ideally I would like this thing hardwired to my PC or better yet the router via USB, but there is next to no cell reception in my home office. So I have the hot spot sitting on the windowsill of my bathroom, where I get two bars of LTE from the tower about 4 miles away and connect via wifi. That's -101 dBm on band 25. Speeds aren't that shabby for living in the middle of nowhere.





I opted for the 3GB plan for $35 for the time being and will pay for it myself and will try it out to see the reliability. If I feel confident it will be reliable enough for me if I'm stuck at home for a few days and if the cable goes down, then I will upgrade to the 12GB plan for $80 and expense it.

What is really nice is the almost real time, up to the second data usage meter on the display of the hot spot. After doing some rough analysis, 12 GB could probably give me two to two and a half days worth of data to work from home if I use it vigilantly . If I get close, I can always upgrade to the 30GB plan for $30 more and drop back down later on, and if work doesn't reimburse me, so what, total difference won't be more then $50 bucks after taxes and fees.

Kinda bum'd that I won't get to play with the dual WAN functionality of my router, and I won't have the convenience of automatic failover, but these ping times are a tad bit better than the 800+ms pings I've seen posted around the internet for satellite. If/when band 26 ever gets here I'll be golden. VPN, RDP and VNC are working almost flawlessly over the LTE connection so far.

Well after about a year and a half I finally decided to pull the trigger on HughesNet. I went to a local retailer (well actually not so local as he’s 70 miles away) who sells and installs everything and anything that comes from a satellite. He allowed to test drive both HughesNet and Exede. Exede doesn’t offer the good plans in my area, so I focused on Hughes.

While the latency was noticeable, it wasn’t that bad. An Ookla speed test had me with a latency of 650ms. I connected to my company VPN with no issue. It usually takes less than 5 seconds to connect to my VPN on cable. Took maybe 10 seconds on satellite. RDP performance was not that great at times, it took a little bit to populate the entire screen as the RDP window was filling in pixel by pixel. Once the screen was populated I was able to use applications with not much of an issue, it was just the redrawing of the screen that took a while, when closing and opening programs. I only use RDP for my own work desktop and our PBX, for all of the servers I use VNC. VNC performance was near flawless, I could not believe how well it worked. I find VNC to be a little wonky at times, so I didn’t expect much, but came out the other side very impressed.

Accessing files over network shares wasn’t that bad either. Simple Word and Excel files were fine. It did tend to struggle with larger videos. The last thing I tested was connectivity to our ERP system. While it took a very long time to connect and authenticate over the VPN, once I was in, I had no problems. I could open, close, created, save, edit, delete anything I wanted to and it took a few seconds for each operation.

I came away pretty impressed. My install date is set for the day before Thanksgiving. Then it will be the fun of configuring the fail over. Looking at information and other people’s experiences who have the same router I do, it can be problematic.

Got my HughesNet installed the other day

This will be a suitable backup if my cable goes out. Now I just have to configure my router.