eSIM lock to specific carrier?

Product Discussion Pepwave MAX
1

Suppose I’m using a peplink eSIM, and I’m in a location where one carrier works much better than the other (e.g. Verizon vs. ATT - I’m in the USA if that matters).

  1. Will the peplink use some sort of health-check settings or signal strength to pick one of the carriers?
  2. Does the peplink UI have settings where I can lock it to one carrier?
  3. In a dual SIM device, can the eSIM be set up so you have a different virtual eSIM in each slot? For example, eSIM:ATT in SIM slot one, and eSIM:Verizon in slot 2?

Basically I’m confused about how this all works with eSIMs.

2
  1. no it goes through the order set by the provider
  2. yes, you can turn off certain PLMN options to pick it
  3. Not with the same esim, you’d have to have 2
1 Like
3

Thanks @Andrew_Fidel : I purchased a BR 1 mini HW3 version which supports eSIMs, and will be testing it in the field this week.

4

Out in field, doing my first tests of the new peplink BR 1 (HW3) with an eSIM:

Positives:

  • the eSIM works! I have decent bandwidth even though I’m in a campsite which otherwise has zero cellphone coverage.

Negatives:
I’ve run into a few glitches.

  1. when arriving at the campsite, I had zero signal. I waited perhaps 20 minutes and nothing worked. This BR1 mini has 2 sim slots, but zero physical SIMs installed; however the eSIM was listed as priority 1.

It seemed like the BR1 was stuck, and was not using the eSIM

The solution: I manually disabled SIM A and SIM B. After saving changes, the eSIM quickly connected. Is there a bug with eSIM priority?

This did not work:

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This did work:

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  1. I can’t see any way to manually select options for which band(s) or carrier(s) the eSIM is supposed to use. The UI i’m seeing shows these options, but only for the physical SIM cards A and B:

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Where do I access the UI to change the eSIM settings?

  1. There’s no easy way to see the data used. The dashboard shows my eSIM total quantity, but not usage. It would be nice if this was displayed on the Dashboard:
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5

Where it says carrier selection click on the ?, Peplink hides many of their advanced menus behind those blue question marks.

6

When I do that, I do see options for SIM A and B, but no options for the eSIM. This is my confusion.

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7

It should be there, see this for example:

Maybe try another browser?

8

Ahoy there!

Don’t forget to scroll to the side (from left to right):

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2 Likes
9

@Captain_Nik has it - I was accessing this using Safari browser on my iPad. I just tried it again and indeed you can scroll to the right. However, by default on my iPad, the UI shows up with almost precisely the right # of pixels for SIM A and B to show up, so there’s basically no indication whatsoever that other SIMs are hidden to the right.

This is super frustrating as well because I’m no longer in the campground where I was having an additional problem, which [Edit] I’ve posted a new thread about

10

When clicking the IP address on the Dashboard, there is a different UI popup which looks like this:

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In this UI I am not able to scroll to the right - but I think all the eSIM details are being shown. Or should I also be able to scroll to the right in this UI and see a 3rd column for eSIM? It’s confusing.