Using wi-fi uplink

Hello.
In case of wan outage, Is there possiblity of using wi-fi uplink?
and, is it possible to use the same wi-fi as AP and client at the same time?

Some people have data plan on their mobile phones supporting hotspot mode.
Some hardware does not have wi-fi connection.
being able to connect to wi-fi hotspot in case of wan outage (automatic or manual) would be great and very cheap.

It should be possible, though don’t expect support in Foris or Reforis. I don’t know about Luci, but that should be possible. And I’m 99% sure that you can’t use one Wifi card in client and AP mode at the same time. But if you have Omnia or the MOX version with multiple cards, you can connect one of the wifi cards to the hotspot and keep the other one making wifi AP.

I’ve found this options page in Luci, so it seems you can easily set the card to client mode from it. But then you’ll need to figure out the rest (moving the wifi interface into wan zone etc.):

One last thought seeing 802.11s - that’s a mesh standard, so if you got it working, your wifi card could possibly connect both to you phone and provide wireless to the other devices.

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One part of this problem is to have possibility of having backup/failover uplink,. whether automatic or not.

but, user-friendly if possible, that requires *foris or at least luci.

other part is to reuse wi-fi for uplink, even if it disables AP mode
(although it would disable e.g. wireless printers).

this needs to be switchable, too.

thanks for the mesh tip. I’m already thinking about mesh network, to cover my household better.

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As this would probably need switching more configs at the same time, I’d strongly suggest to create a script that sets everything via uci. If you’ll rely on your memory, it’ll inevitably fail right at the moment you need it the most :slight_smile:

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I think some people are using LTE modem as failover connection.
this could be somehow reused for backup wi-fi

hopefully this one could be done by mwan3 scripts - they are already available, although not through reforis (but I guess “Extensions of network protocols for 3G/LTE” install that one too).
Some people report those to work already.

Also, some wlan drivers seem to support AP and client at the sametime.

First I’ll try using old router (openwrt), then maybe replacing them just to check if omnia can do that.
thanks for info so far.
So far I was able to configure wireless wan on it. I considered bridging but that would require all clients to renegotiate IP addresses and some devices couldn’t handle as much clients as turris can

thanks for hints for now

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