APNs for Australia

Hello Peplink Team,
We have had a few customers in Australia who wish to use the countries third major cellular/network provider of recent, Vodafone. With the other two major providers (Optus & Telstra), the Pepwave MAX equipment works OK with the APNs that are within the past few versions of firmware for the two larger carriers, though not with Vodafone, in this is case it requires that the Pepwave MAX be locally accessed and programmed with at least the default APN (such as “live.vodafone.com”) before the unit can be put online. This presents a challenge as we have been promoting the deceives as “Send to field & put SIM Card in, unit can then be configure from InControl2 on powered up”, this works OK for Optus & Telstra, just not Vodafone (we have not tested any of the other various MNVOs operating in Australia).

There is a very extensive article (and kept update) in another Australian forum called Whirlpool on the list of APNs used by the major three carriers and he MNVOs
http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/mobiles_apn

Here is another past forum posts on this for reference:

Some other posts for other locations around the world with similar past issues on the Auto APN:

We realise there is a constantly evolving space out there on the APNs from the various carriers around the world, Vodafone changed/updated there APNs over 12 months ago, so it would be good to see these become available in the Auto APN options going forward for the entire Peplink/Pepwave range.

Happy to Help,
Marcus :slight_smile:

@mldowling

Request filed.

Engineering team will review the APNs for Vodafone. I will post again if get latest news from Engineering team

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Hello @sitloongs,
Good to chat with you earlier today, as discussed here is the additional information for others in the forum.

The listing that Peplink currently has for the default auto APN for Australia of PLMN 50503 with vfinternet.au is no longer current (and may be quite old).

In searching through various forums (both Vodafone’s, other Australian forums and international forum), vfinternet.au is only used by a few MNVOs (Mobile Network Virtual Operator) and these mostly date back to 2014 and earlier.

This is the URL to the APNs on Vodafone’s official website (no mention of vfinternet.au):

If you run a search on Vodafone Australia’s website for the older APN of vfinternet.au, you get a negative result:

The trusted place for place for referencing APNs used in Australia across the various providers is currently the Whirlpool Forum, when searching this URL, you can only find four references to the older APN, these are all MNVOs and not Vodafone Australia http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/mobiles_apn, the other searches in the forum are old posts or for other MNVOs, here are two examples:
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1694641
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1490795

To us the evidence is conclusive that the source Peplink is currently referencing for the default APN used by Vodafone Australia is out of date (by possibly several years), please pass this along to the Peplink Engineering Team for revising with the next lot of firmware updated to Peplink & Pepwave devices.
Happy to Help,
Marcus :slight_smile:

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@mldowling

Thank you for the info, i will revert this to Engineering team.

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