I just got some M2M TMobile SIMs and I’m having some weird issues. TMobile engineers are saying there are no issues, while some sales guys are saying they know of some issues 
What I’m seeing is:
intermittent routing to some addresses on some ports. ie, sometimes I can ping google 8.8.8.8, sometimes I get no replies.
Common ports seem to be blocked to some IP addresses. Can’t browse the web on a PC connected to the BR1-Mini for example.
Was not able to send UDP or TCP packets on a number of ports between linux machines over the link (with nc)
Unable to ping an EC2 host that replies to pings BUT am able to connect up pepvpn to an EC2 hosted fusionhub in the same region.
It’s just random, and nothing makes sense as to why it would work or not work. Seeing pings to 8.8.8.8 for 20 minutes and then silence for a day, and then randomly start seeing replies again.
thoughts?
Hi Dan,
I don’t know if this is the case but I’ve seen instances where carriers will filter certain traffic which makes using the SIM and cellular connection unreliable. Ex: Customer can ping amazon.com from their command line/terminal however they can’t access the web site due to the carrier filters.
I’ve also seen some cases with T-Mobile specifically where if it’s not specified the default M2M plan they provide is a very small amount of data that gets throttled after the threshold is passed.
As for the Peplink you can verify the cellular signal readings and compare to accepted values. Below this I have pasted a link to a blog which goes into more detail of each cellular signal readings and what ranges are good and bad.
http://blog.industrialnetworking.com/2014/04/making-sense-of-signal-strengthsignal.html
Thank you
-Collin
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@cschlegel the peplink is up and reporting to incontrol2 without any disruption, and I’m able to get a pepvpn tunnel to a FH Solo EC2 instance that has been stable for 24 hours. I was hoping to not require a link to FH to make use of these because that adds cost overhead but if that’s my only option.
I don’t know that the traffic is necessarily ‘filtered’, so much as some potentially bad routing because it does work intermittently when the BR1-Mini is stationary with good-very good signal levels.
