Sunday/Monday our Verizon FIOS stopped working as did our Verizon telephone (via FIOS.) I went through the MY FIOS troubleshooter (it solved my problems once). A few calls to Verizon later we had a repair scheduled for Thursday – 4 days later.
This presented a problem, currently, we have 4 people, all with jobs, living in our house. All of us are on video constantly and one of us must always work over a VPN on very large documents. We could survive on telephone hotspots for a day or so, but quickly that was going to lose its charm.
To their credit, my wife’s company offered to send a 5G internet router (not here yet, looking forward to it) but that wasn’t gonna help the next 4 days.
Long story short – XFINITY (Comcast) was able to turn back on the cable to our house, a nice person at Best Buy dropped a cable modem in my trunk, and for $40/month we have failover if we ever need it again (they’ll even let me cancel and turn it back on month to month.)
Today Verizon came and fixed what turned out to be a broken ONT and, very kindly left a second so that if it happens again they do not need to roll a truck.
Next steps – explore a RaspBerry Pie or Router solution to automate failover :-).
Total Costs:
| Item | Cost |
| NETGEAR – CM1000-100NAS 3.1 cable modem | $169 (refurb from amazon $129) |
| Config and first month charge | $100 plus $40/month for 200/5MB service |
| Adding In house Line coverage from Verizon | $15/month |