Question on running fiber and cable

T

tango29

I used to have a feed from Spectrum(time Warner at the time) and ATT so I had a backup for my trading. On the few times the cable crashed I had to switch cables to another router that had the ATT feed. Not a horrible pain, but a pain in the ass nonetheless.
Spectrum seems to be having issues in our neighborhood again, and has been on going for over a month. In my past experiences it will take them awhile longer to fix this issue satisfactorily.
So I am thinking I am going to bite the bullet and add ATT fiber as a backup again. I am wondering if anyone has an idea if there is a switch of some sort where you can move between the feeds without having to unplug and plug back in and you are up and running?
Thanks for any input, and I guess a day off for me.
 
tango29 said:
I am wondering if anyone has an idea if there is a switch of some sort where you can move between the feeds without having to unplug and plug back in and you are up and running?
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Yeah, you need to use a router with dual wan support. The Ubiquiti EdgeRouters can handle this with no problem. Your question was actually asked multiple times in Amazon's Q&A section for the product below and the answer was always yes, you can easily set up two incoming WAN connections using the setup wizard so you have automatic failover in case one goes down.

 
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Now that you mention it, I probably will use the fiber as the main source. They just installed it in the neighborhood about a year ago. There claimed speeds for about the same price are much better also.

Thank you Baron, I will look into that one. I didn't think about posing the question on Amazon. After all these years I am still terrible at framing my search queries to get what I am looking for.
 
tango29 said:
Now that you mention it, I probably will use the fiber as the main source. They just installed it in the neighborhood about a year ago. There claimed speeds for about the same price are much better also.

Thank you Baron, I will look into that one. I didn't think about posing the question on Amazon. After all these years I am still terrible at framing my search queries to get what I am looking for.
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I was in your position a few years ago. I had Spectrum Cable for my internet service, but then after repeated problems and outages, I decided to try CenturyLink Gigabit Fiber. After CenturyLink installed the service, I switch over to using that as my main ISP, and kept the Spectrum connection as a backup. I paid for both services for about a year, and then eventually canceled the Spectrum connection altogether because the CenturyLink service was faster and never went down for one second, and on top of that CenturyLink was also cheaper ($65 per month). It's been almost 3 years and my fiber connection has still never gone down even once.
 
I have heard fiber is more reliable, but was never sure if it was provider dependent. If it does prove more reliable I'll probably do the same and switch over completely. Part of my issue with doing it now is I have been with Spectrum/Time Warner for ~28 years and made the huge mistake of using their Roadrunner email for my main email addresses. My understanding is I can't keep them when I cancel service. I have slowly moved a few things over to other email services, but it is going a pain making sure I have all mine as well as the rest of the families changed over.
The little things with tech can really grate on my nerves at times.
 
If you have both cable and fiber, you can use Asus RT-AX86U as your router. It has 2 wan ports. Its review is on YouTube. A cheaper backup plan is T-Mobile's plan for hotspots, only $5/month. You need to buy their hot spot for $90.
 
tango29 said:
I have been with Spectrum/Time Warner for ~28 years and made the huge mistake of using their Roadrunner email for my main email addresses. My understanding is I can't keep them when I cancel service. I have slowly moved a few things over to other email services, but it is going a pain making sure I have all mine as well as the rest of the families changed over.
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Yeah, usually the best course of action is to just bite the bullet and create a new email address for each family member using an email provider that's not tied to your internet service, like Gmail for example.
 
Also a lot of the Killer Network cards' software does automatic roll over from wired to wireless, so you could be wired to fiber and wireless to cable or cellular. It is about a 5 second roll over for me.
 
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