Hi,
(TL;DR - 2 ISPs, 1 hEX, 1 hAP-lite, do both ISPs need to connect to one router?)
Currently, I have 2 ISPs (ISP1 is slow and reliable, ISP2 is much faster (60Mbit) but has its quirks), and a hAP lite doing failover and some policy-based routing choosing which of the 2 to use.
ISP1 enters the house in the office at the back of the house, next to the UPS; ISP2 enters the house at the front (our lounge), and the hAP is high up on the wall there, being a 2nd wireless access point (same SSID as in the office, there are thick brick walls in our house), and I plug it into a USB battery pack when there’s a power cut. (not ideal I know).
ISP1 has just sold-up to a big cable company, who are about to install a FTTH connection. The optical network terminal device they’re promising to install has built-in wifi and either
it’ll deliver our phone line, or the phone line will come in at the same point. If it is delivering the phone, then I’d want a UPS for it, especially since we’ve got a phone-connected alarm.
A hEX is on its way here to connect the office to the FTTH box.
My initial thought was have them run the fibre to the office, and put the FTTH box and the hEX there, keeping ISP2 connected to the hAP-lite. But there’s no phone line to the office, and I don’t see anything on the internet about how to load-balance/failover when users might wirelessly roam between either of 2 routers in the middle of a skype call.
A second thought was to swap the hAP-lite for the new hEX, and have the FTTH arrive in the front of the house, which means I’m not way out of my depth on the configuration, and is better there from the point of view of the phone connection but there’s no UPS there (we’ve had 2 power failures this week…) I think I’d rather re-route the phone than try and put a UPS behind or directly above the sofa…
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Am I right to think that to keep wireless roaming I need to have both ISPs connected directlty to the hEX and do all routing there, or is there some way that the hAP-lite can be made to normally route stuff to the hEX for policy decisions and then back out to an ISP it’s connected to, unless there’s a link failure? That seems like it should be more robust but it also seems like a lot of needless traffic on the link from hAP-lite to hEX.
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Is there some kind of routing policy protocol I’ve not learned about that the hEX could use to tell the hAP-lite which way to send data?
David