Remote from Guwahati: two ISPs, one UPS I talk to like family, and what a flood does to fibre
Failover, not load balancing. Different cables, not different logos. And a log of every outage for when the ISP says "no problem from our side"
Contents
I write Django for a startup in Berlin, from Guwahati. The Brahmaputra view from my window is lovely. The broadband is not. After three years, here is my setup and what it has survived. Medium length, because my UPS only gives me so much time.
The connections
- Primary: local fibre, 100 Mbps on paper, 60 to 80 in reality, very stable when it works.
- Backup: a 5G fixed wireless box from a different operator (Jio AirFiber in my case). Different company, different cables, different towers. That last part matters, see the floods section.
- Emergency: my phone's hotspot. Same operator as the backup, so it is not really redundancy. It is a prayer.
The router
A TP-Link ER605, a small multi-WAN router. Fibre on WAN1, the 5G box on WAN2, in failover mode, not load balancing. Load balancing breaks some video calls and the company VPN when your public IP changes mid-session. Failover keeps it boring.
Online detection pings 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 every few seconds. If both fail on WAN1, traffic moves to WAN2. In practice the switch takes 10 to 20 seconds. My Google Meet freezes, then comes back. My manager in Berlin thinks I have a dramatic pause habit.
The power
- A 12V mini DC UPS for the fibre ONT and the router. About 4 to 5 hours. This small box is the hero of my house. My mother asks about it like a relative: "Is the UPS okay?"
- A 1 kVA inverter with a battery for the laptop, monitor and one fan. Assam summer without a fan is not a workplace.
What it survived
- Floods. Every monsoon the Brahmaputra rises, and somewhere a fibre route along a highway goes under or gets cut by repair work. Last time my fibre was down for two days. The 5G backup carried me, because it came from a completely different direction. If my backup had been a second fibre ISP on the same road, I would have had zero internet and a very honest status update for Berlin.
- Shutdowns. In December 2019, during the protests, mobile internet in Assam was suspended for days. I was a fresher then. Fibre at some offices kept working, mobile did not. The lesson I still carry: do not make all your redundancy mobile, because mobile is the first thing that gets switched off.
- Power cuts. Weekly, sometimes daily in summer. The UPS and the inverter make it a non-event.
Watching it
A Raspberry Pi runs Uptime Kuma and pings out through both connections, so I have a log of every outage. When the ISP says "sir, no problem from our side", I show them the graph. They do not care, but I feel better. Hieu from Self Hosted is teaching me Proxmox, so the Pi may soon have friends.
Timezone
Berlin is 3.5 hours behind me in summer and 4.5 in winter. My day starts at 11 and ends around 8 in the evening. Lunch is a meeting-free window by agreement. Dinner is late. My mother has opinions about this.
Total cost: about ₹2,600 a month for both connections, plus the one-time hardware. Cheaper than one missed release. Also cheaper than explaining to Berlin where Assam is, which I have now done eleven times.
Written by
Bikash Kalita
Remote backend dev (Python, Django) for a startup in Berlin, working from Guwahati. Brahmaputra views, unreliable broadband, two power backups. Northeast represent.
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