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Forum Discussion
NucMed
Jul 17, 2025Tutor
Two Netgear Nighthawks, MR1100/2100
Hi, I apologise in advance if this has been covered elsewhere or if this is not the correct forum for this question. I have two Telstra (AU telecom provider) Netgear Nighthawk 4G mobile broadband...
plemans
Jul 17, 2025Guru - Experienced User
That sounds like an expensive setup/monthly bill. No starlink in your area?
You could always pick up something like the edgerouterx that supports dual wan with failover capability for pretty cheap. That'd make it easier for automatic failover and keep all your devices on the same network.
- NucMedJul 17, 2025Tutor
Thank you for your reply.
Why not Starlink? I suppose I should have put in up front I do not own where I live, I rent a small furnished "holiday home" apartment & there are very rigid restrictions on what I can do, so anything has to be inside only (no aerials/clothes drying on balconies et cetera), further, the owner rents it out on airbnb when I am away for 2/12 each year visiting family, so everything personal has to be easily moved out to storage (& back again).
Cost of the 3 SIMs, ≈AU$75/month for a total 150GB (which I rarely use in the month, but 2 of the 3 SIMs have a rollover facility which is useful for when I might need more than the 150GB).
I'll try to decode the bit about the "edgerouterx that supports dual wan with failover capability" (I'm not very "network techie"), but I assume it means something like attaching both Nighthawks to the edgerouterx and through some firmware/software stuff inside it, it just works having both connected to a single network?
- plemansJul 18, 2025Guru - Experienced User
Not only can they be used for failover, it think it also offers load balancing. there's a few videos on youtube of how to set it up. Nice thing is that its been out for quite a few years and can be picked up cheap on used sites. I would have gotten one quite a while ago for the dual wan potential (and its over abilities) but its only gigabit. Which doesn't matter for most hotspots.
Make a little "cellular" box that has antennas for the hotspots that run back to a central box with the hotspots and then the edgerouter x. Be kind of a cool little "suitcase" you could use for increased speeds (maybe?) and more reliability that is easily put into storage.
- NucMedJul 18, 2025Tutor
Thank you for the idea, I guess I'll try to look at something like that down the track.
However, for the moment whilst still attempting to understand your proposed system & getting back to to the original question "... is there any problem that they have the same gateway 192.168.1.1 (apart from the administration web page being the same), despite the IP addresses being different (2˚ to different ISPs)?"
As far as I can see and given that I've not a background in network design, so please correct me if I'm off the planet on this, my situation with two Nighthawk MR-type modems would not be different to a situation, for instance, if say the apartment next door were to have the same modem as me (and therefore the same gateway, 192.168.1.1), it's just that instead of next door <1 metre away through a common wall, the two modems are in my apartment.