We have been having serious issues with a number of units. The cellular radios suddenly and randomly stop working in the field, so the units lose Internet connectivity. Remote Users and Devices can no longer connect and we cannot remotely access the unit.
To “fix” the issue, I need to send the customer a replacement unit by overnight courier (at a substantial cost), wait for the original unit to come back to me (I have to prepay and send a return shipping label), then open a ticket with Peplink, set the units to allow remote assistance, connect them to a hard wired internet connection, wait a couple of days/weeks until someone from Peplink accesses them, and then they are able to fix it remotely and “recover the cellular module”.
I was wondering how many others were experiencing the same issue. Perhaps pressure from other Peplink customers will force them to fix this known issue once and for all. It is definitely a software bug/problem if they can resolve it through remote assistance,
I read that the newest firmware 7.1.1 build 3102 has some improvements to the radio connectivity, and was wondering if this was actually a fix to this issue.
Yes the units are under warranty, and Peplink fixes them, but this costs us customer downtime and money.
Please don’t ask if I’ve opened support tickets for this issue! Also, please don’t remove this post because it causes embarrassment to Peplink. A forum is for users to vent issues and seek solutions.
Hi - We will review your support tickets and evaluate your issues collectively.
Pending that, I can say that we do see the cellular modules become corrupted and require a software recovery, however this is an extremely low frequency occurrence across our entire deployed base.
It appears you are seeing this happen at a much higher rate than normal.
We will review your cases and report back. I expect we will be back to you by next Wednesday.
My apologies. The problem you have experienced stems from an issue with the cellular module firmware, that is the cellular module inside of our router has it’s own module level firmware. This is separate from our router firmware 7.X.X.
Previous versions of this module firmware could get corrupted during SIM switching events.
This issue has been mitigated in two ways:
Cellular module vendor has updated firmware to address this issue - you can check if the latest is loaded from
http://”xx.xx.xx.xx”/cgi-bin/MANGA/support.cgi (where xx.xx.xx.xx is the ip address of your device).
Then click “Check for update” in the Cellular module firmware update section. <—This is not a trivial task, it generally works fine remotely, but there is a risk it may not come back.
Our firmware has been updated to avoid triggering this issue in units that don’t have the module firmware updated. This change was introduced in 7.1.0 to ease the timing of switching between SIMs
