We’ve been using a Max Transit Duo since 2021 for professional video calls in a camper van, and are thinking of moving to a starlink mini + a minimal cell plan to handle drops and satellite handoffs. Our router obviously doesn’t support eSIMs. It’s still working, though every month or two one of the modems doesn’t recognize any SIMs in it with a variety of error messages, but a reboot or two fixes it (ongoing issue over years with no resolution via support).
We could replace the Max Transit Duo for a BR1 Mini 5G, which would get us 5G+LTE and 4x MIMO on a single modem on our Parsec Husky and eSIM support, but if all we’re doing is a trickle of cell data to stop hard drops from handoffs we don’t really need the performance gains aspect.
The best option with physical SIMs seems to be bringing the router into an ATT store and getting their 20GB/mo prepaid plan for $300/year - we don’t have standard VZN lines to get their postpaid connected device or multiline prepaid plans discounted, so it’d be $40/mo for 5G of data which annoying.
If a single peplink esim would get us through the year, then it’d be worth buying a new router just to get lower overhead on cell plans.
The peplink eSIMs seem like a great solution, though we don’t need the SF allowance as we have 6TB saved up (many locations only have one good carrier and it’s better not to bond, also mobile must have didn’t know how to renew our Primecare so we were without paid for SF for weeks until Frontier had to step in and do it for them, we got some free allowance as an apology) which it seems we’d lose switching to a new router.