Our Internet Survived the Storm

For over a decade now we've had cable internet from a regional ISP, incrementally upgraded to a gigabit over the years. Download speeds have been great, but upload was painful and there were frequent periods of dropped packets and high latency. With both my wife and I working from home we had multiple instances of video calls stalling as a Dropbox or Backblaze sync ran. Anything that consumed our limited upload bandwith would just take us completely down. Having had enough of that, we decided to make a long overdue switch to FIOS and it has been a game changer. It's fast, super reliable, and significantly cheaper than our old plan.

I signed up for FIOS before cancelling the old plan so we had a period of crossover to evaluate if it was the right move. As I was running fiber to my UniFi Dream Machine Pro, the secondary WAN port caught my eye. UniFi has the ability to use a secondary WAN to load balance across the two connections or use it for failover if the primary connection goes down. Given our reliance on a stable internet connection for work, streaming, and CoDM, a backup internet connection was incredibly appealing. The cable provider offered me a great deal to downgrade to their lowest tier and the total cost of the two connections was still cheaper than we were paying for the gigabit cable service alone!

This past weekend I was out of town at PyCon and received numerous severe thunderstorm warnings from back home. UniFi notifications lit up my phone as the secondary cable connection dropped out and came back about 15 minutes later. Not long after, the primary FIOS connection dropped out for 30 minutes and we successfully failed over to the secondary connection until FIOS was restored. This was the first real test of the new resilient setup and it worked flawlessly. Success!