How I Solved My Unreliable Rural Internet Problem with Two Connections

I live in a rural area, and one of the main problems we have faced over the years is the lack of a genuinely reliable internet connection.

When I first moved here, there were no landline-based internet options available. Everything was delivered wirelessly through antennas, and the available connections were generally capped at around 20 Mbps.

This was particularly frustrating because, elsewhere in the country, broadband was becoming commonplace and fibre was beginning to roll out. I had friends and colleagues telling me that their new fibre connections gave them more bandwidth than they knew what to do with, while we were still struggling to maintain a stable connection at all.

Whatever the reason, it went down far too often.

Why Reliable Internet Matters to Us

This was a constant source of frustration for both my wife and me because we both regularly need to work from home.

We also have three teenagers, for whom the internet is effectively the centre of their social, educational and entertainment lives. Whether any of us should be quite so dependent on it is a separate question. The reality, however, is that when our internet stopped working, life became considerably more difficult for the entire household.

For a long time, there were simply no viable alternatives.

Then Starlink became available.

Initially, it was too expensive for me to seriously consider. Over time, however, the price came down, and Starlink eventually offered a trial period. I decided to give it a try.

The difference was immediate.

The speeds were considerably better than those provided by my local wireless provider — on my initial test I got around 400 Mbps down and 50 Mbps up — and the connection was also noticeably more stable. After using it for a while, I decided to keep it.

Keeping the Old Connection as a Backup

As an IT manager, I was reluctant to put all my eggs in one basket.

Even though Starlink appeared to be working well, I decided to keep my existing wireless connection temporarily as a backup. My original intention was to keep both services only until I was completely confident that Starlink would be reliable enough to use on its own.

In practice, Starlink proved to be very dependable, and I rarely needed to switch manually to the secondary connection.

That left me with a different problem.

It was reassuring to have a backup internet connection, but it also seemed wasteful to pay for a service that spent most of its time sitting idle. Plus when I was testing something for a different project one day (more on that in a future post), I connected it directly to the OTA provider and noticed that the speeds had improved to 100 Mbps down and 50 Mbps up. This made it much more useful, so I began looking into whether I could use both connections simultaneously.

Why Use Two Internet Connections?

There are two main advantages to using two connections together.

The first is load balancing. Instead of every device in the house competing for bandwidth on a single connection, the router can distribute different network sessions across both internet providers.

This does not necessarily combine both connections into one enormous download pipe for a single device. Instead, it spreads traffic between them. One computer might be downloading over Starlink while another device is streaming through the secondary connection.

This reduces the chance of one device or activity slowing down everything else in the house.

The second advantage is automatic failover.

If one internet connection stops working, the router automatically routes traffic through the other. The household remains online while the failed connection recovers, usually without anyone needing to change any settings or reconnect their devices.

For a home in which five people regularly use the internet, this sounded ideal.

Finding an Affordable Dual-WAN Router

Most devices designed to manage multiple internet connections are aimed at businesses. They can be powerful, but they are often expensive and unnecessarily complicated for a typical home network.

After some searching, I found an affordable dual-WAN router from Cudy the R700.

The router is physically quite small and requires very little configuration. It has two WAN ports, into which I connected my two internet services, and two LAN ports for connecting the rest of the home network.

I connected one LAN port to the wired network in the house. The other was connected to the main unit of my mesh Wi-Fi system.

Once everything was plugged in, the router detected both internet connections automatically.

The configuration interface allows you to give each connection a different weighting. This determines how the router distributes traffic between them.

You can give one connection a higher weighting if you want most traffic to use it, or give both connections similar weightings and allow the router to distribute traffic more evenly.

In my case, Starlink remains the preferred connection because it is considerably faster. However, the secondary provider is still actively used rather than sitting idle.

How It Has Worked in Practice

I have now been using this configuration for around six months, and it has worked extremely well.

With five people using the internet, we rarely experience noticeable slowdowns. More importantly, genuine outages have become extremely uncommon.

If one provider goes down, the other usually picks up the traffic almost immediately and continues providing internet access until the failed connection is restored.

It has transformed what was once one of the most frustrating parts of living in a rural area into something I hardly need to think about.

Routing Specific Devices Through a Particular Connection

The router also provides more advanced options for anyone who wants to go deeper into the configuration.

You can assign fixed or reserved IP addresses to devices on your network and create rules determining which internet connection they should use.

For example, you could configure a particular computer or games console to always use Starlink. Other devices could be routed through the secondary provider.

This can be useful if you want to keep bandwidth-heavy activities such as streaming, large downloads or gaming separate from everyday web browsing and software updates.

You do not need to configure any of this for the basic load balancing and failover features to work, but it is a useful additional option.

A Couple of Quirks

The system has been very reliable overall, but there are two quirks worth mentioning.

The first concerns the router’s web-based configuration page. For some reason, it does not seem to work particularly well in Safari on my Mac. Using Vivaldi instead has solved the problem completely.

The second issue is that the router itself has stopped responding twice during the six months I have been using it. When this happens, the internet appears to be down even though both underlying connections are still working.

Restarting the router immediately fixes the problem.

I have not yet identified the cause. As a temporary precaution, I am considering scheduling the router to restart automatically once a week at around 2:00 in the morning.

Two incidents in six months are not enough to make me regret the setup, but it is something potential buyers should be aware of.

Is Paying for Two Internet Connections Worth It?

The obvious disadvantage is cost.

You have to pay two internet providers, which will not make financial sense for everyone. However, internet access is becoming cheaper, and it may be possible to use two relatively inexpensive services instead of paying for one premium connection.

This setup is not limited to rural homes either.

Someone with a fast fibre connection could use a cheaper wireless or mobile connection as a backup. The fibre connection could handle gaming, streaming and large downloads, while the secondary connection could carry less demanding traffic or simply remain available for automatic failover.

Whether this is worthwhile depends on how important a reliable connection is to your household.

For us, with two adults who sometimes work from home and three teenagers who use the internet constantly, the additional monthly cost is justified by the reliability and peace of mind it provides.

Internet Redundancy Is Becoming Increasingly Important

The broader lesson from this experience is just how dependent modern households have become on internet access.

People often think about backup options for electricity, heating or water, but home internet redundancy is still relatively uncommon. Until recently, it was also difficult and expensive to implement without buying enterprise networking equipment.

Affordable dual-WAN routers are beginning to change that.

The Cudy router took approximately 15 minutes to set up, required very little technical knowledge for the basic configuration, and allowed me to make practical use of two internet connections that would otherwise have been working independently.

It is not completely flawless, and paying for two providers will not suit everyone. However, for my family, it has been an excellent investment.

After years of unreliable rural internet, we finally have a connection that feels genuinely dependable.