I have RCN internet in my home, and soon both my wife and I will be working from home. The throughput is poor, approximately 8 mbps down, and 1 mbps up. RCN can do nothing about it, as my up to 1 Gbps plan is mostly just marketing nonsense - the shared nature of being in an apartment building severely limits the actual service rendered.
After doing research, the only other provider in my building is Spectrum, which has similar poor performance, according to neighbors. Verizon Fios is not currently available in my building.
I am interested in purchasing a BR1-Pro-5G device and utilizing it with a T-Mobile 50GB 5G data plan. T-Mobile 5G is available in my city (New York City), and the BR1-Pro-5G is an approved device by T-Mobile. It appears the BR1-Pro-5G supports all of the available 5G T-Mobile bands in my area.
I’ve calculated that we would use approximately 8 hours (two people combined) of video conferencing per day, via Microsoft Teams (default resolution and quality). At 20 working days per month and ~250 MB/hr data consumption, I feel decently confident that I would consume ~40GB of data per month for video calls. This renders the 50 GB 5G data plan from T-Mobile a pretty good fit with some margin.
I’m not familiar with the software configuration capability of the BR1-Pro-5G (or other suitable equipment should this not be the ideal choice). I understand I could configure the WANs to have a failover from primary to secondary in the instance the primary fails some sort of uptime health check. This functionality is nice, but not what I want. I’m looking to prioritize the bandwidth to be consumed via the highspeed 5G connection during working hours, then switch to the low-bandwith RCN service during the rest of the day (so as to avoid consuming my data limit and being throttled). I realize I could probably manually switch primary/secondary each and every day but this is tedious and burdensome.
My specific asks:
- Is the BR1-Pro-5G the right equipment to solve my situation?
- Can the software available with the device balance the load as function of time of day?
- Is there an alternative configuration that achieves the balances I’m looking for?
I can accept spending $1K on equipment and $50/month for a solution. I’m not a network engineer, so I would be afraid an overly complex setup that I can’t manage or understand how to troubleshoot.
Thanks for any advice.