I am using a BR1 MK2 and have the Standby State for my cellular connections to remain connected. All is good, however, when I move a cellular item to DISABLED it should disconnect from the carrier and establish a new connection when coming out of the DISABLED priority slot. The reason I know it’s holding a connection is my cellular IP address is not changing. I move the cellular to disabled to intentionally break the connection such as in my case RV’ing and going to a new destination I want it to find the best tower per se. Otherwise I have to reboot to have this occur which is not idea. I just want to drop it to disabled, wait a few minutes, put it back into a priority. When not in the highest priority I do want it to remain connected but anything placed in the DISCONNECTED area should completely shut down, in my opinion.
Hi @NealC,
I am pretty sure this also occurred in previous firmwares. The only way we could change the cellular IP was by resetting the cellular modem. Disabling it and enabling back again brought the same result as one you described - the device established with the same IP.
I am not sure if it’s a bug.
I think disabled is a slot that does not play in priorities, in other words it’s a non failover slot. The connection appears to remain connected, however, this is not the case with the WiFi radios. I would desire that when in the disabled slot that the cellular connection is disconnected otherwise I have no way of disconnected and establishing a new connection without having to change the standby state unfortunately.
I’d suggest then an additional checkbox in the connection’s settings for cellular:
Disabled State: Remain Connected | Disconnected
I am quite certain that the cellular modem is disconnected when disabled. My theory is that The IP remains unchanged because after enabling it, the modem tries to reconnect with the last settings.
@WeiMing can you confirm?
wouldnt it depend on the cellular provider’s lease settings? i.e. you can unplug a cable modem and as long as you plug it back in before the lease expires it will get the same IP
If you disconnect from a cellular carrier you will get a new IP address each time you connect.
That depends on the DHCP lease policy of the particular carrier. Routable IP addresses tend to be stable across significant time intervals.
Exactly. And @zegor_mjol is also correct. We have recent examples where the same IP address was issued after dozens of disconnections/re-connections within 24 hours. We can also point to a situation where each and every time the modem went off-line a new address was issued.
One should be careful of “generalities.”
When I reboot the unit the IP address for AT&T changes. That tells me putting it in disabled is not disconnecting the connection.
I think it might be useful to review a few framework pieces:
- Unless you are setting the IP addresses directly on the router they will be provided by your ISP (presumably AT&T in this case).
- Which IP address the ISP provides, and the length of the lease is completely up to the ISP. For cellular connections they can be static (same IP address for your device, always), routable (an IP address accessible from the rest of the internet, it may change from time to time) or private (e.g., (carrier) NAT or other private address - starting with 10 (e.g., commonly for AT&T) or 100 (e.g., commonly for Verizon)). Some ISPs tend to renew a lease based on the MAC address of the interface, making it fairly stable over time, others just pick one whenever the device connects.
- In all cellular cases these may or may not be correlated with what tower you are connected to, or which cell you are connected through.
Thus, unless you are familiar with the infrastructures of the ISP the change (or lack thereof) in IP address does not really tell you much about what towers your device connects to.
Furthermore, which tower and which band you are connected through is completely up to the cellular ISP, unless you have entered explicit filters on your device (e.g., to limit the connection to a particular frequency band or limit the connection to be above a certain signal threshold).
To check whether your device is connected, and if so, to which cell, you may want to open the detail and engineering panes. When the connection is disabled there should (in my experience) be no IP address showing. The engineering panes will tell you more about cell IDs and the like.
Just $0.02 based on my experience, and quite independently of Peplink equipment 