I’m new to this and have a basic question on the 3G/4G failover capability of Pepwave Surf SOHO routers. Does the router detect your internet service provider WAN outage? I’m not talking about electricity being down and the cable modem powered down, or manually unplugging the WAN cable from the router – obviously those can be easily detected. I refer to the connection to the outside being unavailable (ISP gateways or DNS servers unreachable), while all your home equipment is still up and running locally. Does a Pepwave router actually detect that kind of event and switches to 3G/4G automatically? I want to get Pepwave as a secondary router - I will plug it into my existing primary router, and then plug whatever equipment I need to be up during an ISP outage into the Pepwave. When my ISP WAN is down, I will need Pepwave to accurately and quickly detect that event, and switch to 3G/4G. Subsequently, when the ISP is back up, I will need Pepwave to detect that and switch back to the primary WAN connection.
Peplink/Pepwave routers come with multiple Health Check features, such as DNS lookup, my personal favorite.
These Health Check features keep checking the health of your primary WAN connection.
In my case, when the DNS lookup fails, the primairy WAN connection is deemed as offline.
This will trigger a failover to an available WAN connection, which in this case will be the 4G/3G failover.
Thanks! I’ve downloaded the manual and I see those settings in there.
What about prioritization? Can I indicate which WAN is primary (ISP), failover (3G/4G), and secondary failover (WAN over WiFi), and have the router use what’s available in that order? I can’t yet see it in the manual.
Hi there,
You should be able to easily prioritise your WAN connections in the web admin interface at ‘Dashboard’, by dragging and dropping them.
In this case, your ISP WAN should be priority 1 and your 4G/3G WAN should be priority 2.
Let me know if you get it working!
What about the Surf On-The-Go model? According to its manual, it supports 4G failover, but it’s missing the configuration settings for the health check (Ping, DNS, etc). Without the health check settings, how does it detect the WAN outage then??
I haven’t really worked with the Surf SOHO, to be honest, so I don’t know for sure.
What I do know is that the 4G failover is referring to USB modems, with this model.
Settings as APN and such have to be done in the USB modem itself, but I’m not sure about the health check settings for the USB WAN.
I’d say that health check settings are available for the USB WAN in the Surf SOHO, but just to be sure I’d like someone with more experience on the Surf SOHO to confirm this.
Go with a BR1 Mini, preferably the LTE-A version to be future proof a bit, with the WAN failover license.
Personally, I find the Ping check to be more accurate on WAN & WWAN ports. Just make sure to manually set the server IP’s. I use Google 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, if they’re not available then the world has ended! Don’t use first two DNS as hosts since you might get to a local server, but not necessarily the internet…
Use Smartcheck on all Cell connections and I have a feature request in to add Smartcheck to all WAN’s.
Yes I’m thinking MAX BR1 may be the way to go. The only reason I’m considering Surf On-the-Go is because of its extra low power consumption (5W max) which gives it the longest runtime on a UPS of all Peplink models.
Thinking logically, if On-the-Go has no health check settings (no ping etc.), then it can’t be capable of detecting a Wan outage, can it? It probably fails over only when physically unplugging the cable (if wired wan) or when the wifi signal is lost (if wifi wan). But I’d like someone to confirm this for sure before I give up on this router.
Load Balancing and Failover Is not available on the Surf On-the-Go per the stated spec’s on this link:
http://store.peplink.com/soho-networking/prosumer/pepwave-surf-on-the-go.html
What gets me confused is that there are Failover settings in the manual, even the Health Check interval, but no actual Health Check details.
I was under the impression that Failover/Health settings are signature-standard on all Peplink models. I guess the OTG must be the odd one of the bunch. Too bad, as its portability and low power are unmatched by other models.
Good question and suggest you open a support ticket then report back here with what you learn:
https://contact.peplink.com/secure/create-support-ticket.html
@virtu789, Surf on the Go supports failover if the primary WAN is wired or Wifi WAN. Please find the failover settings below from the latest firmware version.
Thank you for the update.
I’ve also got a similar answer from the 3GStore support Q&A.
It looks like the manual is not updated to reflect the latest firmware. In the provided screenshot I can see the Ping Host option. Only Ping, no DNS or other health checks. So, the bottomline is, Health Check is much more limited in On-the-Go.
@TK_Liew, do you know how fast On-the-Go fails over after it detected a failed health check? Under 10 seconds, under 60 seconds, or longer?
This is depending on the health check settings. You may find the Tips and Tricks
below for better understanding.