Connectivity and reboot problems with 2 of 3 Surf SOHO MK3s

Product Discussion
1

I purchased three Surf SOHO MK3s from a reputable Peplink partner over the past year, and two of the three have given me considerable consistency and reliability problems. This can’t be typical of most people’s experience or Peplink wouldn’t be able to stay in business.

One of the routers began dropping WiFi and then not responding on Ethernet ports and eventually began to reboot on its own with shorter and shorter intervals (i.e. minutes)—Peplink recommended that I roll back to 7.1.2, and the unit has been fine since then (154 days and counting). The other problem router has had a number of WiFi issues, and has more recently begun its own journey of self-reboots. I tried firmware versions 8.1.3, 8.1.2, 8.1.1, and eventually 7.1.2, since that had fixed my problems with the first unit, but none of those helped. The event log never shows anything, and I don’t know what’s in the diagnostic reports. The third router has been rock solid as far as I know, but it’s at my wife’s office, so I don’t see it much.

I purchased these units because of the excellent recommendations by Michael Horowitz on https://routersecurity.org/pepwavesurfsoho.php, but I am mystified by my horrible track record with them. A router should just work. Furthermore, although I started all of them on the same firmware version, each one is now on a different version, either at Peplink’s direction or because of my attempts to find something reliable, so they are no longer in sync with security updates.

I really like these routers, but my confidence in them has dropped considerably. I’m presently looking for a warranty replacement, but not entirely sure that another unit would behave better. There could certainly be some user error here, though I can’t think of any way that my configuration could cause the kind of inconsistencies or reboots that I’m seeing.

Is there a more reliable Peplink router available? What do the rest of you use or recommend?

2

What you’re seeing here is not typical. Occasionally we’ve seen ‘batch related’ hardware issues in a model line - I remember a run of BR1 Minis where the Cellular Main and aux connections were swapped, and a run of Balance units with duff SD cards - but these were ages ago.

Personally I have not deployed the SOHO much - but I know many many people have, will be good to hear what they have to say if they see this.

Bottom line is any Peplink product should run successfully on the latest firmware and if it doesn’t you need to log a ticket with engineering and ride that hard until a solution is found. Use this post here to escalate the ticket numbers too as that can help provide focus.

That said, my experience of the engineering team is that they desperately want to understand the root cause of any issue like this but it takes considerable time and effort from us to support that discovery.

I’m sorry you’ve had your confidence knocked. Let’s get to the bottom of this with engineering and get it fixed.

3

Thank you for sharing your input and experiences. I asked the seller and Peplink to send me a replacement unit, because this is my main router and I need it to work. But I also offered to help them debug the current unit if we’re working toward a conclusive diagnosis and not just wishfully turning knobs (I develop embedded systems for a living). We’ll see whether they take me up on it.