Even with the NBN rollout Australia's fixed-line broadband can be unreliable, which means you need a mobile insurance policy if you can't afford to be offline.
A few months ago I reviewed Telstra's Frontier Gateway broadband modem, which has a built-in SIM card so your home can automatically switch across to Telstra's 4G LTE mobile broadband network if your Telstra fixed-line connection drops out. It would be a good fit for some homes but has limitations which might frustrate power users – which is where the Accelerated 6350-SR LTE comes in.
To be fair the Accelerated 6350-SR LTE is aimed at business users and has a hefty $990Â price tag, but that's not out of the question for small/home businesses or prosumer home users who need reliable broadband and don't want to be tied to Telstra. Offsetting the upfront price is the fact that ditching Telstra is likely to save you money on your monthly bill.
Run your eye down the spec sheet and the 6350-SR LTE ticks a lot of boxes. It features a Gigabit WAN port for connecting to any broadband modem, whether you're on DSL, cable or any flavour of NBN. There are also four Gigabit LAN ports for running Ethernet cables around your home.
On the right-hand side are two WiFi antennas for running a home 802.11n network for your wireless gadgets. On the left are two antennas for connecting to a 3G/4G mobile network, which is your fallback if the WAN port's broadband link drops out. To add an extra level of redundancy, you can even connect a second fixed-line broadband modem to a spare LAN port.
If you'd rather stick with your existing WiFi network – perhaps for the added bonus of bandsteering, beamforming and mesh networking offered by Linksys' Velop, Netgear's Orbi or Google WiFi – then you might opt for the $949 6355-SR LTE which features Ethernet and mobile broadband but no WiFi capabilities.
Put to the test, the Accelerated 6350-SR LTE switches across to mobile broadband within 30 seconds of pulling the plug on your fixed-line broadband. You'll experience a short dropout, but then it's business as usual rather than scrambling to fire up your mobile hotspot.
Once your fixed-line broadband connection comes back online, the router automatically switches back from mobile broadband within 30 to 60 seconds. You can set up alerts to notify you of dropouts.
One of the Accelerated router's key strengths over Telstra's Frontier Gateway is that you can use it with any fixed-line and any mobile broadband service, rather than sticking with Telstra. It supports all of Australia's 3G/4G mobile broadband frequencies.
The 6350-SR LTE's removable 4G LTE module actually features two SIM card slots, with the ability to use different providers and prioritise fallback. It supports CAT6 mobile speeds of up to 300 Mbps (more like 30 to 80 Mbps in real-world conditions), but a CAT16 module is coming which will support Gigabit mobile broadband speeds like Telstra's Nighthawk M1 hotspot. Of course Gigabit mobile coverage is still very limited and in most places you'll only pull down similar speeds to the CAT6 module.
One major shortcoming of Telstra's Frontier Gateway is that it throttles your mobile broadband speeds to 6 Mbps, while Accelerated lets you take full advantage of 4G LTE speeds in your area.
Of course the downside is that with Accelerated you're paying for this mobile data, but you'll find good deals if you shop around – perhaps on a pre-paid deal considering that some months you might not call upon it at all. If outages cost you money then you might consider it a worthwhile investment.
As a business-grade router, the Accelerated is also packed with features that will appeal to power users such as VPN support, virtual LANs and load balancing between mobile and fixed line.
You can actually configure the router to use both mobile and fixed-line broadband simultaneously, determining which devices and applications use which network. This could be the answer if you're stuck on a slow fixed-line connection and need to use fast 4G LTE for some tasks, but don't want to fragment your home network and are reluctant to move your entire home/office across to expensive mobile broadband.
The 6350-SR LTE's $999 price tag also includes a one-year return to base hardware warranty along with a one-year subscription to Accelerated's Aview remote monitoring and dashboard tools, which let you keep an eye on things from afar and make it easy to manage a fleet of Accelerated routers. For $1148 or $1330 you can extend the Aview subscription and warranty to two or three years respectively.
Aview is certainly overkill for small/home office users but the good news is that you don't lose any local functionality when your Aview subscription expires, so there's no need to keep paying for it you don't need it. If you do, it's $150 per year.
At these prices the Accelerated 6350-SR LTE obviously isn't for everyone but if regular broadband outages hurt your bottom line, and you don't want to be tied to a single telco, then you might consider it money well spent. What's your Plan B when your fixed-line broadband goes on the blink?
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