Business 4G Assure - Own Router or Bridge?

Hi,

Have got BT Business Infinity on 300/50 GFast.
The 4G assure dongle came in a separate box, which has never been opened, and the BT Business Hub was switched off once the OpenReach technician had left to be replaced with the GFast modem plugged into my own router instead.

Having had an annoying temporary outage for a while at a particularly inconvenient moment, I've now decided that a failover would be a good thing. So...

1. Can the SIM from the 4G assure dongle be extracted and stuck in a separate 4G Ethernet modem for my own router to failover between? Or is it locked to only work with the BT router?
2. If the dongle only works with the BT router, can the BT router be put in a Bridge Mode, with the GFast modem plugged back into the BT router, and then the the Bridge output from the BT router then goes into the WAN of my own router which then doesn't know the difference between that and today's setup where it has the GFast modem directly plugged in?
3. When it's doing failover, how quick and how sticky is the BT router? Does it wait for a 10 minute outage, or would dropping ping for 1 minute trigger it? And how quickly does it come back to DSL once it's back online?
4. Whilst the running on the 4G assure, do I keep the same static IP address? Or does it temporarily have another IP address until the DSL comes back?

Does anyone have any experience of using it generally?

Thanks!

Edited by Westyfield2 (Sun 22-Nov-20 21:38:58)

1. The BT SIM only works in the 4G Assure dongle - I have not heard of success elsewhere.

2. Your terminology is rather confusing - why would you want to put a router in bridge mmode? And where would the modem be?

3. The switch to 4g is within seconds and it remains there iuntil DSL is restored and seen to be stable for, I believe, 10 minutes.

4. Yes you retain the same static IP

The business hub can do static routing so it would be possible to avoid double-NAT if that was your concern.

I have the BT assure dongle working connected to a Draytek router - I was testing failover today and it works great.

You need to use the DHCP option rather than PPP. The network ID is 'everywhere' which is EE's ID No CHAP ID or password is needed. MTU 1380 - don't know if this could be changed - I just copied the number from some obscure site on the internet. I have not had time to play other than to prove it works. I just use the horrible business router in bridge mode - which does mean obtaining your credentials for PPPoE because unlike the business router, connection is not 'zerotouch' using a 3rd party router!

Cheers

Kevin

Hi, may I please ask how you got the 4g assure dongle working with your router? The help pages say this won't work; I tired setting this up with my asus router as a dual wan as a failover, however it didn't seem to work. The dongle connected to 4g with the solid light, however the internet was not passed through to devices connected to the router.

Ii can’t add much to the post I already wrote. The mtu is vital, it’s the only value that works. Without that, I too got a connection and no traffic. I used a Draytek 2925 and I listed on my first post every settin the is to fiddle with. Annoyingly that was a viability test I did and the production router I’m using is a Draytek 2960. On this router there is no setting for mtu ans so it doesn’t work. I now have to use the bit routers on the two lines but I have removed their firewall and set up a ems on each one to point to the wan ports on the router. It’s a bit like bridge mode in some ways because if I try to connect from the BT routers wan address I get straight through to the Draytek. In fact it’s impossible to see the bit router from the internet. It’s transparent. I know I’ve got double Nat but everything works including vpns so it will have to do. There is no discernible speed penalty.

Good luck

Thank you so much - the MTU value did the trick - the dongle is now working with my own routers dual wan failover...! So now when FTTP is connected I can put the BT hub into bridge mode, then if that cuts out it will fall back on the dongle. Fingers crossed it works this way! I can't believe that BT have not allowed 4g assure to work with their router in bridge mode. I have raised a complaint with them to try and get it working this way.

Anyhow - thank you very much for your help - seems to be looking good so far.