Cradlepoint vs. wifi ranger

Bill.Satellite wrote:
I also preferred to run the WiFi Ranger without any form of automatic fail-over. I prefer to have control over the connections especially if I think I am using campground wifi and find that in the middle of a large download the router switched over to my air card. Yikes! It's easy enough to switch between the 2 using a browser interface.

I'm with Bill on this one. I honestly don't think that failover is that important unless you have multiple internet sources and are protecting yourself from total failure of your primary connection. In most of the situations I have been in as an RVer, I'm lucky if I have two possible internet connections and usually what happens to my primary is that there are occasional slowdowns that last a few minutes. IMHO initiating a failover for that sort of thing is more trouble than it is worth.

To provide a specific example, last winter I had a DSL line and used the CG's wifi as a backup. My WiFi Ranger was quite capable of transferring from the DSL to the wifi if the DSL had an occasional hiccup, but quite often the DSL issue would correct itself almost as quickly as the failover could process. Then I would either have to let the Ranger "think" about reversing the failover or simply do it myself. I was constantly fiddling with the settings of how often should it monitor the internet connection and how low a data rate should I accept before failover commenced. Eventually, I just turned it off and did as Bill suggests by manually switching when I needed to.

It's possible that Cradlepoint products offer more failover options than does the Ranger, but the bottom line is that you're still going to have to make roughly the same choices, what at what speed do you initiate failover and how often should the system check. Given that no internet source have an absolutely constant speed vs time profile, the more often you sample the more likely it is that you will sample during a "slow" spot and will initiate an unnecessary failover or you will sample during an atypical "fast" period and not do a failover even though one was needed. I prefer to make my own judgments as to whether or not my internet connection is performing acceptably; as Bill has noted, there are times when you don't want failover to occur even if it should, such as when you're streaming a video and sure don't want to throw that on the CG's wifi.