Dual WAN Setup with LTE Modem and T-Mobile Home

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

I’m about ready to box up my Peplink Balance 20 BPL-021 and send it back to Amazon. Just can’t get it to work reliably. I have three WAN connections (T-Mobile Home Internet, T-Mobile Essentials, and Consumer Cellular) All on LTE modems. The TM Essentials line provides a 100.x.x.x public IP, the other two are dynamic. I’ve used two different DDNS services and even disabled all but one line to see if things would work.

I get Internet access fine on any connection but cannot get port forwarding to work on the PEP router’s subnet. Have a couple of servers that need NAT forwarding on the same subnet. I’ve gotten this to work a few times but only to wake-up the next day and it’s not working–even with just one WAN port enabled.

Another strange thing is that some devices on the same subnet (same as PEP router) have weird DNS access. Some sites will not resolve and some sites only resolve to the home page and nothing below that–never seen this before.

Anyway, is this router bad or I’m I just in over my head? Like I said, I’ve seen it work but then, without changing anything, it doesn’t.

I’m baffled. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

2

You might have better luck setting up a FusionHub solo in Vultr then port forwarding from there. That way you can use all 3 of your LTE devices and keep the same port forwards always working.

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Thanks! I’ll take a look at that solution. Not sure of the cost. Hope it’s not the only way to make this work.

Steve

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As to Port Forwarding, I would guess that the incoming requests are blocked by the cellphone provider before they get to your router. To test this, setup an Inbound Firewall Rule to allow and log every honored port forwarding request. I am no expert on FusionHub but I believe the intent with that suggestion was to get you a plain vanilla public IP address.

As for DNS, debugging it is hard as heck. Not only is there old DNS and new DNS, but DNS settings might come from the browser, the OS, the router or the ISP (or a VPN). There are assorted DNS testers here, its the place to begin.
Test Your DNS Servers - RouterSecurity.org

6

Great help, thank you!