Cellular Failover for MAX BR1 MK2

Hello,

Very new to Pepwave and impressed so far. Coming from another product I used in my RV/Motorhome I installed the MAX BR1 MK2 last week and am still learning the configuration. I have two SIM cards in the system; Verizon and AT&T. Cellular is priority 1 followed by WAN and the two WiFi networks. WAN is another WiFi system plugged into the WAN port (former system I used in the RV) but most likely will remain offline.

My question is regarding Cellular. Take for example SIM A (Verizon) is connected. If the network slows down or disconnects I want it to failover to SIM B (AT&T) nad vice-versa. I don’t see any speed test configuration such as slowest desirable speed below which a failover will occur. So far in my one week of usage I’ve seen the device disconnect and reconnect and remain on Verizon which may have had poor connectivity at times. I have never seen the system switch over to AT&T (SIM B).

How can I configure this so the system will automatically switch between the two Cellular sources?

It would be much more ideal, I believe, if the Network Configuration / WAN area divided each SIM slot into its own for prioritizing for failover. I’m not sure why they are both pooled as one or how to really configure this per my desires.

Thank you for your advice in configuring two cellular sources for optimal use, speed, and uptime.

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HI @NealC,

Welcome to Peplink.

No - this isn’t possible. You can’t fail-over between SIMS based speed. However, you can try the Signal Threshold setting > Video < - this would apply to both SIMS though - so if neither SIM passes the threshold set, then the Cellular WAN would be considered to fail the Health-check. I believe this is being extended to a per SIM setting with a later Firmware (but I don’t have ETA for that).

How do you have the SIM preference configured? Do you have a “preferred SIM” selected, as shown below:-

If so, in this example, if the device has no data going through SIM B, it would fail-back to SIM A after 3 minutes. If you don’t have any preference, then I would suggest selecting “No Preference”. However, if SIM A is truly the preferred SIM, then I’d recommend something like this instead:-

With the settings above, where SIM B is being used, if there is no traffic going through the device for 30 minutes, it will try to fail-back to SIM A. However, it will also then try to fail-back to SIM A after SIM B has been connected for an hour - regardless of traffic state. If SIM A is able to establish a connection then the device will use SIM A. If not, it will continue to use SIM B. Adjust the timings to suit your requirements.

Note - during SIM “Swapping” (from A to B or B to A) there will be a short period where the connection drops. This is because the BR1 has a single cellular modem, so it has to disconnect one SIM from the network and then attempt to connect the second SIM to it’s network.

This isn’t possible with the BR1, as the Cellular Modem is the WAN connection, not SIM A / B. With other models we do have this ability, where the device has multiple cellular modems. However, in these models too, this is a per Cellular Module, not a per SIM option.

There are different Health-check settings that you can apply and test, but my personal favorite, when dealing with cellular is this:-

I hope this helps,

Steve

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Outstanding information, thank you. I’ll experiment with the info provided. Yesterday I did set a preferred sim, prior to that it was not set.