3g/GPRS connectivity

Hey guys,

Do any of you guys have experience running part of your fleet on 3g/GPRS connected devices?

Many of my devices (RPi2/3) are running on ethernet, but availability is so extremely important that I’m thinking of giving them 3g/gprs connectivity as backup. Would love to configure it in such a way that Raspi will use ethernet when available, and switch to cellular when needed.

Any experience? Will the host OS be able to handle connecting through a modem?

Planning on using standard off the shelf huawei modems

BR, Frans

Hey @FransvanHoogstraten, I know there were some 3G modem tests (@shaunmulligan was running something recently?), though those seem to be mostly as primary connection, not fallback (if I recall correctly). The upcoming resinOS 2.0 also switches to NetworkManager from connman, and should have some more flexibility to set things up. Also, you could probably do the whole failover on the router’s side (meaning the router chooses when to switch over to a backup 3G from Ethernet), there should be more options like that available now. If your networking is extremely important, then maybe the dedicated hardware would be a better solution (at least at this point).

Just thinking out loud, others might know more!

Hmm, ok thanks for the reply! I’m gonna do some tests in the coming weeks, see what I can find out.

It’s relevant to our interests too, would love to hear whatever you found out!
And will see I can find out more about what mobile networking setup we’ve tested!