[ubuntu-uk] Using a 3G modem as a fallback

[Chris Ray]

Dan Fish wrote:
> Colin Law wrote:
>   
>> 2009/11/10 Andrew Oakley <Andrew.Oakley at hesa.ac.uk>:
>>   
>>     
>>> I'm moving out of The Sticks, slightly to the west of nowhere in the
>>> Cotswolds - which nevertheless already has 2.5Mbit ADSL - to the urban
>>> metropolis that is a satellite village near Tewkesbury. With this comes
>>> wonders of the modern age, the likes of which I have never experienced near
>>> my home, such as street lighting, paved footpaths, gas that comes in pipes
>>> instead of bottles, mains sewerage and 3G coverage.
>>>
>>> Given that I already have my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server set up as a NAT router
>>> for ADSL broadband, how difficult would it be to set up a cheapo 3G modem as
>>> a fallback?
>>>
>>>     
>>>       
>> I would wait till you find out whether it is an issue, failures should
>> be very rare.  Certainly for me they have not been often enough to
>> justify the effort of an automated fallback system.  (A couple of
>> times in three years).
>>
>> Colin
>>
>>   
>>     
> Looking at a similar setup myself - moved to virgin cable and not sure
> how stable it is. I've just setup a the zeroshell linux distro in a
> virtual machine which is excellent for this sort of this
> (http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/)
> Dan
>
>   

ADSL failures are not rare.  Reliability varies hugely and is geography 
dependent. It's all about the distance you are from the telephone 
exchange, which not only affects the download speed you get but also 
affects line drop-outs as well.
I live in a small village of 2000 people 20 miles south of Manchester. 
The telephone exchange is in the next village (of 3000 people) about 2 
mile away. Most of my village reports around 1Mbps data rates on 8Mbps 
services.
But for a number of years now I have been running a script that checks 
if the line is up every 60 seconds. ( it just pings 3 places on the 
Internet and lists the results). I have another script that gives me a 
daily performance report.
Here is the report since October 1st.   For each day it reports:
Whether the line was up at midnight, has many line failures during the 
day, the longest outage, the longest uptime and when that ended, the 
daily availability.
I have not had a single day without a failure this year, but good days 
only fail a few times and usually for a few minutes, so I just wait. 
Occasionally I wait an hour!
It reports the end time of the longest uptime because I wondered if 
there were any patterns ( I have a customer who believes his ADSL always 
slows down at 16:30 every afternoon)
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the current average UK ADSL 
speed is only around 3Mbps, so I suspect anyone getting less than that 
are also getting occasional drop-outs. But if the drop-outs are less 
that a couple of minutes and they can't see the lights on their ADSL 
modem, they will probably think a website is down or reboot their computer.

I have also looked at 3G to help matters. The best 3G I can get is 1.5 
Mbps (on the "3" network using a HUAWEI E160G modem; I found a 1G/month 
contract for £5/month)
The E160G appears to have a socket for an external aerial, I wondered 
about putting a high-gain unit on the roof pointing at the mast and what 
speed I would get as a result ( anyone any experience here?), at the 
moment I have to dangle the modem out of a window to get any signal at all.
Finally I have no idea how reliable the 3G service would be.

The Billion BiPAC 7402X has built in 3G fallback, I installed one for a 
customer. You plug the 3G modem into a rear USB socket. But their list 
price is around £98

Hope this helps
Chris Ray.


Thu Oct 01 UP Failures:   6  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  551 
ending@ 12:38:01  Availability: 99.24%
Fri Oct 02 UP Failures:   8  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  366 
ending@ 09:26:01  Availability: 98.82%
Sat Oct 03 UP Failures:   9  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  374 
ending@ 16:59:01  Availability: 98.82%
Sun Oct 04 UP Failures:   9  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  818 
ending@ 15:17:01  Availability: 98.82%
Mon Oct 05 UP Failures:  10  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  321 
ending@ 00:00:00  Availability: 98.61%
Tue Oct 06 UP Failures:   5  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  426 
ending@ 07:06:01  Availability: 99.24%
Wed Oct 07 UP Failures:  14  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  396 
ending@ 16:28:01  Availability: 98.19%
Thu Oct 08 UP Failures:  20  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  479 
ending@ 07:59:01  Availability: 97.22%
Fri Oct 09 UP Failures:  20  Longest outage:  77  Longest Uptime:  372 
ending@ 06:12:01  Availability: 87.15%
Sat Oct 10 UP Failures:   3  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  692 
ending@ 21:33:01  Availability: 99.51%
Sun Oct 11 UP Failures:  16  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  503 
ending@ 08:47:02  Availability: 97.78%
Mon Oct 12 UP Failures:  14  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  607 
ending@ 10:07:01  Availability: 98.12%
Tue Oct 13 UP Failures:  10  Longest outage:   6  Longest Uptime:  479 
ending@ 07:59:01  Availability: 98.12%
Wed Oct 14 UP Failures:  30  Longest outage:   4  Longest Uptime:  213 
ending@ 20:36:01  Availability: 96.18%
Thu Oct 15 UP Failures:  22  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  484 
ending@ 08:04:01  Availability: 96.94%
Fri Oct 16 UP Failures:  18  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  377 
ending@ 09:47:02  Availability: 97.64%
Sat Oct 17 UP Failures:   5  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  491 
ending@ 00:00:00  Availability: 99.51%
Sun Oct 18 UP Failures:   5  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  599 
ending@ 22:22:01  Availability: 99.24%
Mon Oct 19 UP Failures:  24  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  370 
ending@ 06:10:02  Availability: 97.08%
Tue Oct 20 UP Failures:  28  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  256 
ending@ 04:16:01  Availability: 96.25%
Wed Oct 21 UP Failures:  17  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  525 
ending@ 08:45:01  Availability: 97.92%
Thu Oct 22 UP Failures:  13  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  657 
ending@ 11:09:01  Availability: 98.33%
Fri Oct 23 UP Failures:  16  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  390 
ending@ 08:06:01  Availability: 97.92%
Sat Oct 24 UP Failures:   9  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  317 
ending@ 16:17:01  Availability: 98.75%
Sun Oct 25 UP Failures:  10  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  366 
ending@ 00:00:00  Availability: 98.61%
Mon Oct 26 UP Failures:  22  Longest outage:   4  Longest Uptime:  510 
ending@ 10:13:01  Availability: 96.81%
Tue Oct 27 UP Failures:  17  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  321 
ending@ 10:38:02  Availability: 97.71%
Wed Oct 28 UP Failures:  11  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  239 
ending@ 03:59:02  Availability: 98.61%
Thu Oct 29 UP Failures:  16  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  535 
ending@ 09:42:01  Availability: 98.06%
Fri Oct 30 UP Failures:  38  Longest outage:   8  Longest Uptime:  318 
ending@ 09:39:01  Availability: 93.12%
Sat Oct 31 UP Failures:   9  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  483 
ending@ 08:03:01  Availability: 98.68%
Sun Nov 01 UP Failures:   6  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  502 
ending@ 09:19:01  Availability: 99.17%
Mon Nov 02 UP Failures:  52  Longest outage:   8  Longest Uptime:  404 
ending@ 11:37:01  Availability: 90.49%
Tue Nov 03 UP Failures:  95  Longest outage:   8  Longest Uptime:  560 
ending@ 09:25:01  Availability: 81.53%
Wed Nov 04 UP Failures:  75  Longest outage:  18  Longest Uptime:  564 
ending@ 09:54:01  Availability: 83.89%
Thu Nov 05 UP Failures:  71  Longest outage:  40  Longest Uptime:  388 
ending@ 00:00:00  Availability: 77.36%
Fri Nov 06 UP Failures:  89  Longest outage:  22  Longest Uptime:  247 
ending@ 04:07:01  Availability: 72.43%
Sat Nov 07 UP Failures:   6  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  412 
ending@ 08:04:01  Availability: 99.17%
Sun Nov 08 UP Failures:   5  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  833 
ending@ 22:27:01  Availability: 99.24%
Mon Nov 09 UP Failures:  33  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  270 
ending@ 18:49:01  Availability: 95.62%
Tue Nov 10 UP Failures:  13  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  369 
ending@ 06:16:02  Availability: 98.19%
Wed Nov 11 UP Failures:  14  Longest outage:   3  Longest Uptime:  484 
ending@ 09:28:01  Availability: 98.06%
Thu Nov 12 UP Failures:  22  Longest outage:   4  Longest Uptime:  323 
ending@ 06:39:01  Availability: 96.81%
Fri Nov 13 UP Failures:  22  Longest outage:   4  Longest Uptime:  447 
ending@ 15:36:02  Availability: 96.74%
Sat Nov 14 UP Failures:  27  Longest outage:   4  Longest Uptime:  306 
ending@ 13:08:01  Availability: 96.04%
Sun Nov 15 UP Failures:   7  Longest outage:   2  Longest Uptime:  327 
ending@ 16:33:01  Availability: 99.03%
Mon Nov 16 UP Failures:  53  Longest outage:  17  Longest Uptime:  487 
ending@ 08:07:01  Availability: 82.99%
Tue Nov 17 UP Failures:  26  Longest outage:   7  Longest Uptime:  358 
ending@ 08:16:01  Availability: 96.04%