Brough Turner, Netblazr, Freemium & Redundant IP For SOHO

mjgraves | July 13, 2011

This video is Brough Turner at the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks 2010 in Vienna. I truly admire the way this man thinks.

To be plain, anyone who works from a home office professionally should not be without redundant IP connectivity. Period.

In my case it’s Comcast Business Class cable backed by Covad DSL. However, I’d jump on Netblazr in a New York minute if they were offering the service in Houston. I very nearly switched to Sprint’s ill-fated point-to-point terrestrial wireless as my backup plan before it was discontinued.

That Netblazr is leveraging beam-forming via consumer hardware, and without a truck-roll, is absolutely perfect. I’m  not a big fan of the freemium business model, but I’d pay for their service.

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  • http://voip.psu.edu/ John Balogh

    What hardware do you use for the redundant ISP selection? I’ve been having moderate success with pfSense but sometimes my selection of an in-cloud monitoring point fails due to a route change in the other ISP.

    • http://www.mgraves.com mjgraves

      I have used both m0n0nwall and pfsense on Soekris hardware, but to date I’ve not employed an auto fail-over mechanism. M0n0wall doesn’t support dual-WAN at all. pfsense does, but didn’t support traffic shaping over dual-WAN until relatively recently.

      So, the wired network is on the Comcast service. The Wifi is on the DSL. Each on its own router. When the Comcast service goes out I can switch the wired LAN over to the DSL very easily.

      I intend to reconfigure to use pfsense on a small host platform with three NICs. That would implement auto-fail-over. It’s been on my to-do list for a while, but not really a priority.

    • http://www.netblazr.com/ Brough Turner

      Many of our customers are small and medium businesses with various business class edge routers or Sonic Wall security appliances. Most of these (admittedly expensive for SOHO) devices now support dual WAN interfaces with your choice of failover or loadsharing.

      At a more affordable price, there are some $140 – $165 off-the-shelf devices that some of our customers are using. One that I’ve seen a couple of times recently is the TP-Link TL-R480T+ Dual WAN SMB Broadband Router. I’ve also see boxes from SysWAN and there’s an older LinkSys product (RV042) that I have had some less than stellar experience with (one time only).

      • http://www.mgraves.com mjgraves

        Thanks for the tips. I have experience of such devices in other applications.

        I still prefer open source solutions like m0n0wall, pfsense or vyatta. On wee SBC hardware like Soekris or PCEngines ALIX they run around $250-350 and deliver a great deal of flexibility for the money. My employer has a pfsense with quad-wan at our UK HQ, largely on my recommendation. It was a tremendous improvement over the MS ISA it replaced!