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I have two wifi networks in the office, one hooked up to a cable which is unmetered and one to a cellular net which is metered. The idea is to provide a redundant network connections should one go down.

I can hook up both networks to the relevant servers (obviously there are modems that bridge onto the wifi networks). But what I want to do is prioritize so that all traffic goes through the cabled network and the cellular network is only used if the cable network is down. The goal is to have the cellular bridged network as a back up. The idea is that all the computers that actually need this level of redundancy have a couple of USB->WiFi devices plugged in.

All devices are Windows 10 systems.

This seems to be something that a lot of people would want to do but short of some ridiculously expensive equipment from CISCO I'm not sure how it can be done. It is surely possible simply in the network stack software, but I cannot find how to configure it.

Anybody got any suggestions?

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    Instead of two wifi networks, consider a router that connects to both your cable and cellular network. The router can choose the cable path, or the cellular if cable is unavailable. With two wifi networks, every computer has to test the connections on its own. And the cable may be down, but the wifi will still be up.
    – Ron Trunk
    Sep 2, 2019 at 0:13
  • @RonTrunk is right - this is a task for a router with two network connections. There are plenty of options that are not 'ridiculously expensive' in a work environment.
    – Daniel K
    Sep 2, 2019 at 7:18

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Go shopping for a multi homed "dual WAN" router, and a cellular modem. Include products targeted at small business and branch office. There are many more vendors than one. Prices are usually competitive.

A central point to mange the path is easier. Traffic must already go through this router. A desktop operating system doesn't have obvious tools to deal with down paths one hop away; the wifi may still be working but without Internet and WAN. Extra USB wifi NICs are not necessary if physical multi pathing to the desktops can be removed.

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  • So yes, I understand from this and the other comments that you can do it like that, but I already have the hardware to bridge from my cable modem to the wifi net, and from the cellular network to another wifi net. I can switch between the wifi networks pefectly adequately by manually selecting them. But it seems obvious that this can be easily done automatically in software with no need for extra hardware. Am I hearing from you all that although it could be done Microsoft just never put it in the network stack?
    – Fraser Orr
    Sep 3, 2019 at 19:47
  • I mean I could do some horrible hack like turning off the cell network connection, and constantly pinging the cable network to see if it is alive. If it is down I could run a powershell script to turn on the cell network, then doing a ping to turn it off when the cable network comes back. But that is a quite horrible hack for something that it seems to be should be pretty straightforward in the network configuration. Am I missing something?
    – Fraser Orr
    Sep 3, 2019 at 19:49
  • @FraserOrr yes, you are missing believing the answer that is correct.
    – Daniel K
    Sep 4, 2019 at 7:52
  • I am not saying it cannot be done in the client OS. Rather, the cost of a small multihomed router is not that much compared to the uptime it gives you, plus the time you will spend on this. Sep 4, 2019 at 21:19

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