Having some bandwidth and connectivity issues that could use the forums help with.
Just installed a Max Transit Cat 18 that replaced my netgear LTE LB1120 modem. I have been pulling down 20Mbps with the LB1120 consistently with few connectivity interruptions for a few years now.
[setup]
Max Transit Cat 18 with two Poynting XPOL-2-5G antennas mounted on the roof. The building is in a rural area with cell towers about 1.5 miles away. I can visually see the towers from the roof. The two cell towers are few hundred yards from each other one having bands [2, 4, 17, 30] and the other [2, 4, 5, 66] from cell mapper. You can’t see both towers in the image because they are on top of each other.
I have used a surface laptop that had a snapdragon modem a few months ago that pulled down 60Mbps consecutively for multiple days inside the building.
[Issues]
Cannot get a consistent bandwidth - I have configured the modem to use LTE Only and I have tried going through each band and turning off and on doing a speedtest. I have gotten some okay speeds when going through the bands but any time I had a decent speed I could not keep them for more than a short period of time. Best speeds I have received with speedtest have been [75down, 147up; 50down, 40up; 55down, 35up] but that was just a few times. So I know the tower(s) is capable of doing some pretty high speeds to my location. Usually I average around (35down, 15up) until the modem is on for half a day or so and the connection goes form LTE-A to LTE and gets super super slow (5down, 1up) until i recycle the device. I am fairly technical but I am new to peplink devices. Looking for anyone’s thoughts on how to get better speeds and deal with the weird drop in bandwidth.
I have the new Max Transit router with Cat 18 modem with similar results. I have to reboot the router at least twice a day. The reason for the reboot a little different I lose all DNS, I can not resolve DNS from my iMac and the speeds before rebooting are very slow. Every morning when i sit at my desk as I live in RV my VoIP phone is working. but I can not surf on the Max Transit until I reboot.
I am having the same problem as well. I just tested it last night after I did the post above. I set a alarm for 3AM this morning to test and see whats going on.
At some point after that post above and 3AM the Transit device does not resolve DNS for devices behind the router. However I am able to remote into the network from outside via team viewer. I was also able to ping and traceroute to 1.1.1.1 during this time from the System > Tools on the Transit Router.
Once I reboot the device all clients are able to resolve normally.
It could be that the tower is in high use? (too many clients connecting to tower / back haul bandwidth limitations) I have been in plenty of areas where there is practically no bandwidth during the day and in the middle of the night its super fast. Towers also can have issues.
Also what plan are you on? All the carriers now have something like a dozen different priorities. It is possible that a plan or device such as peplink is getting depriortized badly versus the surface which could have been on a higher priority. that is the issue when people say their cell phone is getting 100mbps down but its on a plan with a higher priority and then they are using a data only plan that is deprioritized and complaining of lower speeds despite the same tower/band in use.
i’ve also seen cases where cellular radios/modems vary/have compatibility issues / don’t play nice together.
Just a note … 1.1.1.1 is Cloudflare which recently had a major problem … Cloudflare outage takes down Discord, Shopify, Politico and others. While it does not sound like this is your issue, you may wish to use the servers of two different providers. As an example: We typically use 1.1.1.2 and 9.9.9.9, both filtered DNS.
Thanks. This bring up a feature request. I wish I could set a priority on each band within the max transit web admin. I’d rather set a priority than be able to turn them on and off.
I have a ticket going with peplink support. I have sent in a diagnostic report so well see what they come back with. FYI - I did turn off Health check yesterday and the device hasn’t lost outbound DNS traffic since then.
Ahhh. OK, that’s an important finding. Please remind me what you are/were doing vis-a-vis health checks. Ping? DNS resolution? I’ll mention this: In a single WAN environment health checks are not a lot of value and we often disable them. However, in a multi-WAN situation the feature is extremely valuable and is, in fact, what makes some of the features like fail-over and load balancing “work.”
In in Austin, Texas on AT&T and wanted to share my outage from this morning because it might help you in troubleshooting these issues. I was surfing Apple news and around 9AM this morning, images stopped loading. I went to my browser and I couldn’t get to any websites at all. Logged into my peplink and it said the connection was still up (I use SmartCheck). I went to the SpeedFusion tab and sure enough my tunnel to Dallas was working fine. I then went to outbound policy and told it to send my iPad down the tunnel to Dallas … low and behold everything started working… which means AT&Ts 80 and 443 web proxy is what went down this morning. 20 minutes later I jumped back off the tunnel via outbound policy and AT&Ts web proxy is working again now… frustratingly complicated.
Hello @Legionetz
This is a piece of interesting information on your experience worth sharing, it shows just a snippet of the type of factors that can affect peoples experience of connecting the internet, the connection was there, though part of an ISP providers services was letting you down. Glad to read and see your ISP services also returned to normal.
Happy to Help,
Marcus
