Setting up 4G Backup with Google Fi and Netgear LM1200
Waylon Walker
Learning in Public @_WaylonWalker
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I connected my home network to have 4G bakcup with Google Fi and Netgear LM1200. Goodle Fi offers free data-only sim cards that you can order from their service. It takes a couple of days, and a new sim arrives in the mail free of charge. It does pull data from your account, so if you are not on an unlimited plan be careful of how much you let go through the sim.
I've owned this for a few years now, but it's been disconnected for a good six months or so. I'm not s[e what happened, but it stopped recognizing the old sim card. no need to point out the coffee stains at the end, its definitely not related
Follow the provided instuctions
Activating the sim asked for a confirmation code shipped with the sim card, then brought me to this page.
Clicking Have a Different Device? brought up instructions to set up the APN in the LM1200.
Restart
First thing for me was that the sim was not recognized, restarting the LM1200 did the trick to recognize it as a Google Fi sim, and I started setting up by adding the APN as instructed from Google.
Setup LM1200
Once restarted the LM1200 was recognize the sim right away and I was able to add the APN details.
Connected
After Saving these I was immediately connected as a backup.
Testing Failover
Backups do not exist without testing. I pulled the WAN cable from the LM1200 and after a few seconds it swapped over to the backup.
The dashboard shows fully connected, and it popped up that it sent an alert to my phone, but that did not work for me. I might hae something misconfigured.
I ran a speed test and got a pretty respectable 38 Mbit/s up and 12 Mbit/s down.
I reconnected the WAN cable and it went back to the primary, and it sat at orange for about 10 seconds before switching back to wired connection.
Fully back on wired.
Now its all back up and running giving me a super cheap 4G backup with pretty low effort. Hopefully its reliable, I've upgraded about everything else on my network since last running this, I think it will behave much better. I think some other issues were actually causing me to think I was not getting connection and this fully got pulled from the network to try to fix it.
Why not 5G?
The devices are way more expensive and this gives me all I need for a backup.