Failover very slow

Hi, I'm pretty new to routers and so on, so this may be a bit of a n00b question: I have my axt-1800 set to failover mode using my mobile tether as primary metwork source and home wifi as secondary.
To test it out I set up a ping in a terminal to 8.8.8.8 and turn off my tether.
I lose internet for about 30 seconds before I'm switched to the wifi source, but I was under the impression failover was going to be almost transparent. If that happens when I'm on a zoom call (one of the main reasons i wanted failover with the router) it could cause me big problems.
Does anyone have any suggestions to speed up failover switching?

Hi,

Failover depends on the rates you configured. Mostly failover - even in companies with professional firewalls - are not transparent and there are a few seconds to minutes of no internet connection.

Since failover in your case means getting a new IP, there are other things that will interrupt a few moments, like session timeouts, etc.

You can try to adjust the Sensitivity Options: Multi-WAN - GL.iNet Router Docs 4 but I would say that 30 seconds are fine.

Hey @admon thanks for the response! I've set my sensitivity to high, but I'm a little confused on the description on these setting in the UI though:

"...It is recommended to use low sensitivity when Internet access is unstable to avoid frequent network switching; it is recommended to use high sensitivity when video or live streaming to ensure that you can switch Internet access quickly; switching to high sensitivity may result in network disconnection.Please adjust it with caution."

From that I'm understanding that low is best with unstable internet because the failover is probably slower than the network recovery. But I'm not clear on why high means you can switch internet access quickly during video calls - seems like that would be worse (a regular 30 second loss of connectivity against some laggy moments)?

I don't know the exact mechanism here, but I would say:

Low sensitivity → some pings (so maybe 5-10, I don't know) can get lost without making the router think that it needs to switch the connection

High sensitivity → fewer pings can get lost

If your connection is bad all the time, it would not make sense to use "High" because it might cause switching often. If your internet were sooo bad, you should omit failover and use the better line all the time - that's why it would make no sense then.

So it is not really about network recovery time, but about the chance that the check fails (so a ping misses) but the connection is still there - which might happen on crappy lines like 3G for example.

I guess @alzhao might be able to confirm or deny my thesis :smile:

It seems not science to me.

Makes sense, thanks again for helping me understand!

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