I have been using the subject router (or it’s predecessor) for a handful of years. Occasionally, we get into what I’d call an edge case scenario and the router just doesn’t work well, even when our cell phones are working. This is currently happening while connected to T-Mobile’s network using one of their SIM cards. Currently I’m tethered to my T-Mobile phone because the Pepwave device-provided network is unusable (even though it is on the same account).
We’ve also had this happen (elsewhere) when connected to Verizon, although in that case we were using a different account. Similarly though, we could use our Verizon and T-Mobile cell phones, but the Pepwave device simply didn’t work well enough to be usable.
Most of the time the device works just fine. But there are these locations where it just doesn’t work. I’d blame the carriers except the cell phones are working fine.
So I’m curious if there are settings I should be checking to improve performance enough to make it usable?
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Update: An observation I have made is that my phone is not in roaming mode (we’re in Mexico at this point) but the Pepwave has to be in roaming mode in order to connect. Why would those settings be different?
As for the last part, I suspect the reason that your phone is not on roaming while the Peplink has to be is due to the type of plan the SIM card in your Peplink is on. Carriers have different types of plans for different devices, so the plan your phone is on will have different stipulations than the plan for the Peplink.
It took me until today to get connected back to the forums here. I’ll try playing a bit with the bands. We head back north tomorrow so I may have to wait to do more experimentation the next time we see this situation. I can try comparing to what bands the phones are connecting as well.
In my experimentation, only Bands 4 and 7 would allow my device to connect. My iPhone 11 appears to be Band 66, which I understand to be a wider bandwidth version of band 4? However, I’m no expert and the information I’m reading may not be fully correct. Or it could be an issue of how the phone is reporting the LTE band from the cell.
Anyway, I’ll keep experimenting. I assume the Pepwave is limited to the smaller subset of blocks (A-F)?
