I currently have a wifi antenna that feeds into a ubiquiti airmax bullet M with a custom app that let’s me select which wifi network to connect to, it then rebroadcasts that to the boat via a simple wifi router.
However, when wifi is not available, I now have no internet on the boat.
The plan is to use a pepwave BR1 (not sure which one yet) as an LTE modem and failover device, so that when wifi is not available, it fails over to LTE.
However, the question is, once it has failed over to LTE, will it “block” the WAN port that the wifi antenna is connected to? Or will I still be able to use the app or airos website to scan and connect to a wifi signal?
Then once reconected to a wifi network, it would flip back to wifi.
When the health check on the BR1 detects that the internet connectivity has failed on the WAN it will mark it as unhealthy and all subsequent traffic will failover to LTE. You will not be able to communicate with the UBNT AP device on the WAN from the LAN of the BR1 until the connection is healthy again.
One way to do this would be to retain the use of the existing wifi router and use WiFI as WAN on the BR1 to connect through that router to the UBNT AP. Then your AP can still connect to the existing wireless router also to reconfigure as needed.
As soon as internet is available on the WiFI antenna, the BR1 will fail back to WiFI.
The only requirement for communicating with the Airmax on WAN1 is for it to be in priority 1. Normal setup would be Cell as Priority 2 so it would failover for internet data, but you would still be able to ping the Airmax on WAN 1 to configure. Even if you couldn’t, just move the Cell to disable and then drill in to the Airmax on WAN1 You could also use the built in BR1 WiFi, but you would need to make sure you have excellent coax to the antenna plus a proper antenna. If on a boat then I would go with the Shakespeare 5239 which has a standard 1"-14 marine mount thread.
This is not what I experience. As soon as the WAN is deemed unhealthy no traffic passes via that unhealthy WAN until it is healthy again. So a radio / gateway on the unhealthy WAN is not pingable or accessible by LAN clients until it comes back online.
OK just double checked this. If you add an outbound policy (enforced) with a destination set as the Ubiquiti device IP and force it to use the correct WAN, traffic WILL pass from LAN to that device even when the WAN is in an unhealthy state.
@MartinLangmaid Hi Martin. I’ve never tried this. Is it generally true that traffic will be routed to an unhealthy WAN if the outbound policy is set as “enforced?”
This is relevant to us as we have an installation where a carrier (Comcast in the USA) randomly throws packets into the bit bucket. No means of health check works effectively, even DNS lookup. So, those WANs are up and down – 24 hours/day – but only because the Balance “says so.”.
@MartinLangmaid What are the consequences of having an enforced outbound policy? You said data will still be passed through that wan port, does that mean it will route everything to it? Or will internet still be available via the other source (LTE), but I will still be able to “talk” to the ubiquiti device when it is not connected to the internet?
Since the outbound policy would only affect outbound traffic specifically addressed to the specific IP of the Ubiquiti radio/router, there should be no other consequence of enabling such an outbound rule. Just make sure you specify the IP of the ubiquiti device when you create it. Otherwise and enforced policy with any | any (source | destination) will force all outbound traffic via the specified wan link whether its healthy or not.
