Summer Networking
SD-WAN in the woods, or how I took a downed telephone pole and turned it into an opportunity.
My family has a cabin in the Berkshires that we use throughout the summer, spending each weekend there. Of course, my job requires me to be ready to help our customers around the clock, so having network access is a must. Our house is in a very rural hill town, at the end of a half mile dirt road. As such, our options for broadband are quite limited; no companies will bring fiber or coax to our house, leaving us with DSL, satellite, and LTE as options. Satellite was a bit slow, LTE was a bit expensive, so we went with DSL. It had been working well enough, until some windstorms in April took down a telephone pole on our road.
The process for getting the phone company out to repair downed phone lines on a private road requires persistence and patience. When we went out to the lake two weeks ago when I discovered the down lines, I was fortunate that I wasn't called into action. (Though I always have tethering to my cell phone as a last resort.) This past weekend, I went out there prepared: a Sierra Wireless LTE modem, a USB caddy for it, a SIM card courtesy of my office, and a bit of elbow grease to get it all working.
The net result was that I was able to get my primary router at the lake using AT&T's LTE network to connect to the outside world, as well as to the rest of my 128T router collective. Good thing, too: unlike the weekend before, I was called into action this weekend.
Although I had originally ruled out LTE due to the cost, I will say the performance is significantly better than DSL. With DSL, the kids can watch streaming video, but it saturates the link. With LTE, we were able to stream video while also doing routine web browsing. The plan is now to keep an eye on bandwidth consumption and investigate the relative cost of switching over to LTE in full.
Having the WAN connection re-established rejoined my wayward router to its management platform hosted at our primary residence. Meanwhile, Verizon swears that this week they'll get the line techs out to repair our DSL circuit. This means I'll truly have my own SD-WAN playground... one more thing to keep me from seeing the sun, even at the most relaxing place on earth.