Ability to set WAN connection parameters by time-of-day?

Product Discussion Feature Requests
1

I unfortunately live in the Land of No Broadband Service so I have a Balance 580 that I use to aggregate bandwidth from two satellite connections, two DSL connections and a cellular link. Of these services, the satellite provides the most bandwidth - but it’s also the most restrictive in terms of usage caps and daily allowance periods.

For example, one of my satellite links gives me 15mbps with a 40gb maximum per month, but only for usage between the houses of 8am and 5p. My other satellite connection gives me 10Mbps with a 20gb maximum per month, but a “bonus” allowance of 20gb used between the hours of 2am and 7am.

I can control cut-in and cut-out based on usage, to a degree (because I can’t really provide logic for the “bonus” periods) but what I have no way of controlling is the cut-ins/cut-outs by time. I’d like to be able to set a rule to cut-in the 15Mbps sat link between the hours of 8-6 and set the priority accordingly, but then switch things up once that goes offline and I need to re-shuffle the remaining connections for the evening… and then shuffle again to bring the second sat link back online at 2am, and so on.

I don’t see an obvious way to do this in the console. Two questions:

  1. Is there a kludge-y way to do it otherwise?
  2. Can I make this a feature request for a new FW release?

Thanks!

2

Hi, there is no way currently to manage WAN link availability based on time. The good news is that this is under development, the not so good news is that it is not expected in the next GA firmware release (which will be 6.2). I will move this thread to feature requests so we can add your voice for this new feature.

For a really clunky way to achieve part of what you need, you could add a plugin in mechanical timer power adapter to your satellite modem that turns it on between the hours of 8am-5pm but powers it off outside of those hours… hardly graceful I realise but it would work.

Thanks for your feature request.

3

Thank you Martin. Indeed, we often overlook the simple and elegant in favour of complexity and I am guilty of that here! My home is fully automated, so doing what you described is actually quite do-able: I just need to switch power to the outlet or power module feeding the sat modem(s), and that is something easily within my current capabilities! My Balance 580 will just see the connection disconnect/reconnect and adjust accordingly. That works!

Cheers,
Jcd