Hello,
I have a MAX-BR1-LTE-US which receive very poor signal. on the device it shows me one bar strength and browsing very slow barley works and timing out. tried tweaking various options without any improvement.
If I pull the SIM and use it in my phone it receives 5 bars and blazing fast browsing.
I was wondering if PepLink makes and better LTE modems? I thought about trying the bigger brother, the MAX BR not the mini, but not sure it the radios are the same in those units if there will be any improvements.
any product recommendations?
Suspect the phone supports more (different) frequencies than the BR1 as the BR1 with its larger antennas would typically give you better signal than a smartphone on the same frequency.
You can get the BR1 in an LTE-A modem variant and I know there are LTE-A Pro and 5G modules coming for other MAX devices.
Fundamentally though there will always be a trade off between a high end smart phone and a Router. People will spend $1000 on a posh smartphone for instagram but don’t want to spend half that on a router to run their business, then expect the router to do a bunch of things a smartphone wouldn’t typically be designed to do.
We have customers with businesses that have run off of connectivity supplied by a BR1 comfortably for many years - with us providing remote monitoring and support the whole time. They (and we) wouldn’t be able to do that with a single smartphone.
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May I add a brief comment to @MartinLangmaid’s insightful response? You’ll likely find that adding a cross-polarized antenna would improve the signal/performance of the router significantly. The cost is minimal – could be less than US$100.
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For what it’s worth, I’ve used a BR1 mini LTE-A version in two somewhat difficult locations; in both of them it’s performed at least twice as well as either my phone (purchased last year) or the verizon jetpack (last year’s latest model, now one behind.) In one location I used the included antennas and they worked great. In another that is really difficult (often no service on the phone) I’ve used external proxicast omni antennas and that has worked well. (used wilson omni before and that also worked, but not as strong as the proxicast I have now.)
I’m not sure where you’re located or how your signal looks.
You might also try looking at the bands the BR1 is using and if you have a little time, try manually selecting a band by trial and error one at a time. Last year I had a problem with ATT where I would get stuck on a slow band but clicking the ? to give the option to manually select bands and unchecking that band really helped.
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Thank you all for the replies. I appreciate it. I will try external antenna as recommended and tweaking the bands. thanks again!
I’d take a step back and do some basic querying…
find out what bands the phone is connecting to. find out what bands the peplink is connecting to. select the peplink to connect to the same band (if available). check the signal strength on the phone (not just bars) and check it on the peplink. compare & contrast.