Hello,
I’m new to the Pepwave and love it, it is the answer to my world in a RV and getting much better connectivity. I run a software business so connectivity is vital to my roaming office setup. My feedback is based on firmware 7.1.1.
I’m coming from a WiFi Ranger (WFR) product which has worked well but the Pepwave is much more polished, enterprise, and with the cellular modem an all around better solution. But some things with the Pepwave could be improved from a usability standpoint, keep in mind I’m a software developer so UI/UX is my passion as well.
-
I have two SIM cards in my system, one for Verizon and one for AT&T. I don’t always want the system to be switching based on signal strength. Maybe I am getting to a campground and want to test both networks and see which is best and lock in on that one. Maybe I’m driving and I see a slow down and want to switch to the other on command. I understand the priority order of WiFi, Cellular, etc. but Cellular A and B are not separated, it’s lumped as just a Cellular source as obviously in your design you’re thinking one modem. I’m thinking two networks though. What I liked in the WiFi ranger setup was I could command a connection to anything I wanted at any time. Yes, there are failover options but if I want to connect to my WiFi 5 Ghz node in standby now, give me a connect button so I can connect on demand now. If you broke out Cellular SIM A and SIM B in the network view, I could command a connection to either one of those at this top level. You get the gist. So essentially a commanded connection puts it as the priority source. You could add a setting that when a connection is manually connected then failover is no longer in play OR the connected source will remain connected until it fails and then failover takes over.
-
The peplink app is extremely limited. It’s more of a read only viewer than anything else. I need to be able to change connections from the app. Such as in the above if I want to switch from SIM A to B I cannot do this in the app natively. I can find my way to the remote admin area which is just going to the web UI, see #3 below
-
The Web UI from the app needs to be a much better responsive format. It is not ideal from a mobile phone interface. Barely usable in fact.
-
The incontrol app doesn’t do much for me, again a limited viewer
-
I originally had email notifications turned on and I got a barrage of notifications. This area needs to be expanded into user selectable options for what they want to be notified about. Granular choices (checkboxes) is typical. Otherwise the common action of the user, like me, will be to turn it off rendering it useless. You added this capability, great, but it needs more work to be left alone and manageable.
-
Dragging and dropping network sources is a bit hard to work with at times, not sure why I have to finagle the drag/drop to get things where I want them, the problem really comes in when putting more than one item in the same priority slot, which I’m not even sure you wanted done. You could adopt an alternative UI of up/down arrows which may be easier, not sure.
-
On this discussion already - speed testing and presenting the values. For example, when you change to a different network provider (WiFi, SIM A, or B) do a speed test at that time and present the value. If you want to refresh it at a time interval, all the better.
-
Allow us to choose the speed test size or use an auto option (WFR does this)
-
Allow failover based on a speed threshold (WFR does this)
-
Bug - probably severe in the spirit of GDPR and privacy. Every time I go to the pepwave iOS app settings “Usage Data Collection” is always ON. I turn it off, come back to it later and it’s ON again.
That’s all I can think of for now. Hope this helps shape future improvements and I look forward to years of great pepwave use ahead.