Equipment: Max BR1 Pro 5G
Firmware: 8.2.1 build 5018
Upon my friend’s current visit to the north woods cabin at which this is installed we started getting “Cellular: Disconnected (Link down)”/“Cellular: Connected” emails.
Screenshot of Reports → Event Log → WAN
Note they’re all about a minute long and most occur in the evening through early morning. My guess is that’s usually the time period with the heaviest prolonged usage (streaming)?
ETA: Disregard that last guess. Looking again I realize the events are pretty evenly distributed across the clock. Plus I just talked to him. Nobody was using the network at all at 01:30 this morning.
Here’s what the WAN Quality looks like:
Anybody have any insights as to what might be going on, here?
Modem’s been installed at this location since Aug., 2022. This is the first time we’ve seen this behavior.
Nobody, at Peplink or otherwise, has any insight into this behavior?
The signal strength looks good.
Have you upgraded to the latest firmware?
Have you upgraded the cellular modem firmware, under the support.cgi page?
What plan is it on? Is is for routers?
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He has not yet upgraded to the latest firmware. He’ll do that next weekend. (Too bloody cold [8°F] in the pole barn in which it’s sited to be dealing with fiddly little metal hardware in case the upgrade failed and he had to take it down to bring it to me.)
Didn’t know upgrading the cellular modem firmware was a separate step. Could you save us the trouble and point us to the support.cgi page? Thanks!
By “plan” one presumes you mean cell plan? It’s an AT&T data plan is all I know.
Again: Modem’s been in place since Aug. 2022. This has never happened before.
Thanks for the follow-up!
Nice! Where you located, been pretty cold here north of Dallas as well! We will be putting internet in our goat barn soon enough.
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I am in S.E. Michigan. My buddy’s cabin is in northern lower Michigan.
I’m disappointed Peplink hasn’t stepped in to comment on this 
A lot of forum interactions are with peplink partners such as myself. Peplink does try to step in when they can. If you need faster support, the best way is to reach out to your peplink partner or submit a peplink ticket.
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Thanks, Jonathan!
He’ll update the firmware this coming weekend. (And the cellular modem firmware if I can figure out how.) We’ll reach out to Peplink if the problem persists after that.
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My friend upgraded the firmware just before he left the cabin last time. Got back up there two days ago. That didn’t fix it. In fact the problem is marginally worse, if anything.
I’ve submitted a support ticket.
My Max BR1 Pro 5G is doing the same thing. Every 5.5 hours, it disconnects from Sim A (AT&T) and reconnects a minute later. It kept doing it after moving to a different area (so a different cell for sure) and after a reboot. It’s been doing it for at least four days, but hadn’t noticed this behavior last time I had the camper out (a month ago?). Was running 8.4.0, but just now updated to 8.4.1 to see if it fixes it. Will let you know in 5.5 hours.
As I noted: A firmware update didn’t help in the case of my buddy’s MAX BR1 Pro 5g.
As soon as he locates the box with the antennas and PSU in it, he’s going to bring it to me so I can hook it up to my network and update the cellular modem firmware. (You need a secondary WAN connection for that, for some reason.)
I’ll post an update after that.
Thanks. I wasn’t sure which versions you were referencing, so I noted mine (old and new). It’s still doing it, and it’s very regular. I’ll dump the log into Excel to get the exact intervals, but it’s roughly 5.5 hours, every time.
Here are the intervals (HH:MM:SS) between my last five disconnections. Suspiciously regular…
5:29:58
5:30:02
5:30:01
5:29:59
5:29:59
James, any update on the ticket you submitted or the effect of updating the modem firmware?
Nope. My buddy was unable to locate the box with the power supply and antennas last time he was up there. Waiting for him to go back up, locate that stuff, and bring it all to me so I can update the cellular modem firmware here. (That requires a WAN connection.)
If I had a bit of cash to burn I’d buy myself a BR1 Mini 5G to replace the NetGear LTE modem I have, get my SIM swapped out from a mini to a nano, then, when his BR1 Max 5G was here, swap my TMO SIM into it and see what it does on their network.
Well, looks like a cellular modem firmware update did the trick. He did the update about 38 hours ago. The connection hasn’t dropped since.
Can anybody provide a technical explanation of why a separate WAN connection is required? From his description of the update process, it doesn’t seem like there’s any reason it should be necessary.
Or is that really only necessary if the update is being done remotely, via InControl, and he could have done that locally, without the separate WAN connection, all along?
