Portable networking

I may have asked this before, but I can’t find any trace of the replies.

I’m looking for a way to provide broadband to a building used intermittently, and where the power is turned off between uses. It would also be useful if the equipment could be used elsewhere.

I’m thinking of using a mobile phone connection rather than a phone line for this.

I’ve looked into the various devices made specifically for this, which are all battery powered. The problem with them is that after the power is turned off, the battery goes flat, and needs manual intervention to get the connection back up after power is restored. A mains-powered router in contrast handles this well. I know there are mains-powered routers which also use a data-only sim card for backup. The question is whether the backup will come up automatically when power is applied, even if there is no phone line plugged into the primary connection.

Ideally the sim card deal would allow data to roll over from one month to the next. On the occasions when this would be used, usage might be reasonably high, e.g. playing a video or online games.

I think I received one suggestion previously, but as I recall it was for a router costing around £250. I was hoping for a sub-£100 device.

Your thoughts please.

RISC OS→Forums-Community Support.

I’d suggest asking one of the (local) Mobile phone operators or looking at one of the deals websites as your starting point for equipment and contracts.

My experience is of a shop-bought mobile battery portable wireless router, which worked whilst dealing with poor service from a new internet provider. At the time, there were also mobile broadband-only routers and judging by your gaming requirement, that’ll be 5G- I’m going to suggest it won’t be cheap! Black Friday soon- so you may get lucky on the equipment and contract.

Our only problem was the mobile phone signal fluctuating between 3 and 4G- which will impact your choices based on the building structure, location and mobile phone operator. Our device didn’t lose its settings, but it did get hot and needed to be left plugged in.

I may have asked this before, but I can’t find any trace of the replies.

The thread you were looking for (where you refer back to another possible previous) is this here

I think that pretty much every device is going to come up with a price in the same £200 plus range.
Searching for Fortinet 4G or 5G routers will bring similar results.

You could get a cheap second hand ASUS ADSL router and attach a 4G or 5G USB dongle to it. It can be configured to fail over to the dongle if there is no ADSL signal. The router being mains will come up in about a minute of powered on. As for data roll over, checkout the various options from the mobile operators, not forgetting the smaller VMNOs.