Hybrid Connect & 3rd Party Routers

[aislingeg]

I've had an Asus router (RT-AC86U) connected in to my network for a while, and just switched over to BT.  Hybrid Connect seems really useful, but seems to only work if connected to my Smart Hub 2 while my Smart Hub 2 is not connected into anything else.  It shows as "disconnected" if the Smart Hub 2 is plugged into the WAN port of my Asus router, whether the Hybrid Connect module is connected into the Smart Hub 2 as normal or into the Asus router.  Is there a way to get around this? Can the sim from the Hybrid Connect module be connected straight in to the Asus router in another way (dongle, directly etc), or will it only ever work if the Hybrid Connect and the Smart Hub 2 are the only networking devices on the network?  I'd like the extra stability of Hybrid, but would like to retain my extra features from my 3rd party router and being able to create a mesh, so any workarounds would be great.

[Crimliar]

If the only feature you are using the Asus router for is to create a Mesh network, then you'd probably do better putting the Asus into AP (access point) mode and having the BT router manage everything else on the network - it then should just work.
Otherwise you could try putting the Asus router into dual-WAN mode with the Hybrid connect set as the fall-back device.  Whether this will work, I don't know, it'll depend on how "custom" the BT solution is and if there are additional cost issues if it goes wrong.  *Asus router fallback is not instantaneous, and frankly not that reliable (that's coming from an Asus Fanboy!).

[licquorice]

It won't work. The hybrid connect connects to the SH2 WAN connection internally and is completely proprietary.

The only option is as @Crimliar has suggested, using the Asus in AP mode

[TimCurtis]

I don't agree with using the Asus in AP mode.

I'd set the SH2 up as basically a modem as I did with my full fibre as I had to use it for Digital Voice.

Basically I set the SH2 as 192.168.2.1 and my Asus as 192.168.1.1 and plugged  it's WAN port into port 1 of the SH2 , giving it an ethernet address of 192.168.2.2 and directed all the SH2 traffic to 192.168.2.2 . A few other things to sort out but that sort of setup should work best with the Asus controlling all the network traffic and the SH2 providing the internet access along with the hybrid stuff.