The Cheapest Dual WAN Router for Failover You’ll Ever Find

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Working from home doing my work requires internet and energy. Something that you can’t take for granted when living on the beach in Brasil. The energy drops a second or two at least 10 times a day. Luckily we have UPS for that, but I need a Dual WAN Router for Failover.

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Needless to say, I’ve been exploring various Dual WAN Router for Failover solutions. I’m also interested in testing and doing training on Netscaler SD-WAN. So Twitter to the rescue.

Richard Parnell on Twitter about WAN router for failover

If you don’t know Richard Parnell let me do a quick introduction. He’s the man behind the scene of all the keynote demos presented at Citrix Summit and Synergy.

He’s also the one paid by Citrix just to have fun & build the most amazing labs with the latest technology. This kind of travelling lab is used by Citrix System Engineers around the world and tracked by Tile.

travelling lab is used by Citrix System Engineers

Needless to say, I went with the $100 Ubiquiti EdgeMax EdgeRouter Lite ERLite-3 as recommended.

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The EdgeOS is based upon Vyatta and are extremely powerful. I did some research but couldn’t find anything related to my needs and the latest EdgeOS Firmware 1.9.

So I headed over to UpWork and contracted an Ubiquiti expert named Issam for $40/hour (Protip: search for highest price & best rating). I even found PowerShell MVP Adam Bertram that created the GUI for my Automation Framework on UpWork.

Architecture

I have my main 50 mb/s fiber internet connection and a TP-LINK TL-MR3420 3G/4G Wireless N Router for failover when main link fails.

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Shout out to my Netscaler mentor Dave Brett for the awesome Visio drawing.

Configuration

First, you’ll want to connect to the router and upgrade the firmware to the latest release. After that just connect through Putty and dump the configuration.

In my setup, I have external traffic routed to the EdgeRouter and from there Port Forward to 192.168.2.13 which is my Netscaler Unified Gateway.

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As you can see from the above configuration, this router is extremely flexible. I can even add custom Hosts names to the router. No more custom hosts file entries on my computer(s).

To check the status of your configuration run the following command:

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Conclusion

How could anyone live without the EdgeRouter? It’s perfect for any professional home or branch office. Get two internet connections from two different vendors and you have yourself a $100 Dual WAN Router for Failover. There are even bigger models that let you bundle 8 WAN interfaces!

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15 thoughts on “The Cheapest Dual WAN Router for Failover You’ll Ever Find”

  1. I know this post is two years old but I found it usefull. So Can I use the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X Advanced Gigabit Ethernet Routers ER-X 256MB Storage 5 Gigabit RJ45 ports for the same job? I have a comcast, AT&T, and Version wireless access points and I would like to use this solution for fail over. Also I went to UpWork and looked for Ubiquiti expert and it returned nothing. What were the exact categories you chose when looking for someone to program this router? Or if you have a suggestion.

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  2. We have our EdgeRouter-X setup for dual WAN set in balancing mode but would like to drop one of the providers and purchase a Ethernet 4G LTE Modem to replace it as a fail-over. Does any one know what $G modem would activate and connect only when the WAN port is activated?

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  3. Hi, nice post.
    So just one question doesn’t the TP-LINK TL-MR3420 3G/4G supposed to do this failover process? I’m currently in the same situation working from home in a Brasilian Beach and the fiber connection it’s not reliable.
    Thanks man!

    Reply
  4. I have a couple questions about the experience of using this setup.

    How long does it take for a WAN failure to be detected and fail over to the backup WAN?

    How is a WAN connection failure detected? (Ping timeouts, dns lookup failures, etc)

    For this setup to work for me, I need the detection to be based on pings failing (satellites are going in and out of range all the time), and I need the failover to happen very quickly, ideally in under a second. For example, sustaining a video call with only a short blip. Is there hope for me?

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  5. Is it possible to X-over the failover?
    E.g. Two DSL routers (two lines incoming)
    – DSL#1 should routed to LAN#1
    – DSL#2 should routed to LAN#2
    – if DSL#1 crashes route DSL#2 to LAN#1
    – if DSL#2 crashes route DSL#1 to LAN#2

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  6. 2023
    I moved over from Edge to a TP-Link ER7206. It has multiple WAN port capabilities. For someone without networking admin experience its easy to setup and maintain.
    It comes in two variants

    ER605 CAD $80
    ER7206 CAD $170 (+SPF WAN port)
    And I just saw
    TL-R470T+ CAD $50

    Reply

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