Have an old Max Transit Duo (non Pro), getting Starlink Mini. Best alternative to a Peplink eSIM for trickle cellular bonding?

Specialized Market Starlink
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Questions:

  1. Any good physical sim plans similar to peplink’s eSIM NA/Europe plan?

  2. If not, BR1 Mini 5G vs Max Transit Duo + 5G dongle.

  3. Bonus, confirm expected bandwidth with a “trickle” cellular policy bonded to starlink.

Context:

We’ve been using a Max Transit Duo since 2021 for professional video calls in a camper van with ATT/VZN/TMO data plans, and are thinking of moving to a starlink mini + a minimal cell plan to handle drops and satellite handoffs. Our router obviously doesn’t support eSIMs. It’s still working, though every month or two one of the modems doesn’t recognize any SIMs in it with a variety of error messages, but a reboot or two fixes it (ongoing issue over years since we got it with no resolution via support).

We could replace the Max Transit Duo for a BR1 Mini 5G, which would get us 5G+LTE and 4x MIMO on a single modem (two cell modems aren’t as necessary w starlink as primary source) on our Parsec Husky and eSIM support, but if all we’re doing is a trickle of cell data to stop hard drops from sat handoffs we don’t really need the performance gains aspect.

There’s also the new 5G dongle, thought I can’t find the compatibility list for it on the peplink site (the product page link is busted and goes to a generic page, and the datasheet doesn’t have that info). We’d also be stuck with the slower CPU on the Duo for bonding performance and it’s nearly the price of a BR1 Mini 5G and a less elegant solution, though we’d then have the option of three cell modems (which isn’t realistically useful for us).

The best option with physical SIMs seems to be bringing the router into an ATT store and getting their 20GB/mo prepaid plan for $300/year - we don’t have standard VZN lines to get their postpaid connected device or multiline prepaid plans discounted, so it’d be $40/mo for 5G of data on that network which annoying.

If a single peplink esim would get us through the year, then it’d be worth buying a new router just to get lower overhead on cell plans, along with a lower primecare overhead.

The peplink eSIMs seem like a great solution, though we don’t need the SF allowance as we have 6TB saved up (many locations only have one good carrier and it’s better not to bond, also mobile must have didn’t know how to renew our Primecare so we were without paid for SF for weeks until Frontier had to step in and do it for them, we got some free allowance as an apology) which it seems we’d lose switching to a new router.

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bump :slight_smile:

Also rewrote the title to be relate to the main focus of the post better.

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I think a lot depends on what trade offs you’re willing to make because low usage / low cost SIMs for consumers tend to have weird and/or hidden trade offs.

If you want something super cheap, I’ve experimented with buying the TCL Linkport IK511 from T-Mobile and moving the SIM to my Peplink without a problem. That used to be $10/m and now it’s $5/m for a modest amount of data. It does require a 24m commitment in exchange for the “free” modem dongle.

If you want something unlimited but weird then there is Calyx at $500/year. They’re a non-profit and the support is almost nonexistent but you get an unlimited data SIM on T-Mobile’s network. I’m using that now and I’m happy with it as a backup/smoothing WAN.

If you’re a Google fan, then their “Fi” MVNO lets you add up to four data-only SIMs to a phone plan (and it shares data with the phone plan). I wish more carriers would do this.

If you want something carrier agnostic(ish), then USMobile is good for low usage and the only consumer plan that I know of that lets people pool data across SIMs.

Finally, I don’t work for MobileMustHave but RV life is why they created their RoamLink MVNO.

PS – I’d try cleaning your SIMs with isopropyl alcohol if you’re having reliability issues and then avoid touching the metal contacts when the SIM is inserted.

1 Like
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Thanks for that detailed response. :slight_smile:

For a single carrier ATT or VZN would be preferred, multicarrier would be icing on the cake. My partner is usually on Verizon in winter/spring and ATT in summer/fall, so I guess we could swap around too. TMO is pretty much the worst carrier or just doesn’t get signal (the Max Transit Duo doesn’t support b71), but might be fine just to trickle a starlink keepalive.

Calyx: $500 a year for TMO… iirc we’re paying $50/mo month for 100GB and that’s a normal supported plan (though we don’t use it much).

The TCL Linkport IK511 sounds interesting. I can’t seem to find those plans online, can you share a link or specs? 24m commitment is fine, I’ve been doing 12m prepaid plans on my personal phone (att, visible).

GoogleFi & USMobile - are you able to use the normal data for that on the peplink router, or does that come out of their hotspot allowance? USMobile is interesting, we normally don’t change our primary carrier that often as is so even on a cheaper plan the $2 fee is nothing.

RoamLink MVNO honestly seems like it could be the best solution once we sort out of how much bandwidth we’re actually going to use. I have been super unimpressed with their tech support in the past with very simple asks, and contacted them about an antenna that’s directional (in the way they were selling it) that they were marketing as being omnidirectional. They agreed they were wrong, but said they weren’t going to change it (and didn’t).

Good to know their SIM card works on 12v??? https://mobilemusthave.com/cdn/shop/files/internetbuiltforlifeontheroad.png?v=1773182909&width=1080

We’ll drop ATT & TMO we know that starlink bonding works and is set up correctly, then play around to see what allowances we actually need on VZN (our most expensive plan, but the most useful one for us june-oct, and without starlink having higher priority is good so we’ve been on business VZN and ATT plans) and then take it from there I think - this gives us a lot of options to look at. :slight_smile:

re: cleaning with swabs, the unit gives a variety of different errors on that modem, a reboot or two fixes it. When firmware 8.2x came out the entire unit would freeze up, modem reboot, iirc which made it unusable. Tech support couldn’t isolate an issue with repeated access to logs and some custom firmware etc. Stuck on 8.1x for a while then tried out 8.4 and it’s been fine aside from it occasionally not reading/connecting to the sim.

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Hi @erutan,

Jacob N from MobileMustHave/RoamLink here, we would be happy to help correct any tech support issues you’ve had with us in the past and welcome you to take a look at RoamLink :slight_smile:

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Years ago we renewed primecare and were without service for weeks because your techs didn’t know how to apply it to our router. I was repeatedly told it was my fault because I didn’t enter the information into the router myself.

Fronter finally stepped in and fixed it because no one at your company apparently knew how, despite me quoting and linking to official documentation.

Not sure how you can correct that. Better training I guess.

On the second point, email chain from a while back:

Parsec Husky Pro 7-in-1 Antenna – MobileMustHave.com “Description: 5G, Omni-Directional, 4x4 MIMO LTE, 2x2 WiFi, GPS, IP-67 Rated, 7’ or 15’ Cables”

“This antenna variant features 4 cellular antennas, 2 wireless antennas, and 1 GPS antenna making it a perfect match for our Peplink Dual CAT 6, 12”

Erik (senior specialist): “I’d rather be connected with some directional bias than not connected at all and that example proved true time and time again without rotating the antenna.”

Me: “I’m not saying it doesn’t work well in the field […] I’m just trying to point out that unless people dive into the MIRC forum, they’re expecting to buy an omni antenna as that is how you’re selling it… which it isn’t when it’s running on two antennas per modem! There can be at least a 6db fluctuation which is a meaningful difference… if people don’t know it’s semi-directional they wouldn’t think of repositioning / moving the antenna if they’re in a spot with marginal reception since they were recommended to buy the best omnidirectional antenna. Does that make sense?”

Erik: “I get what your saying but the vast majority of our customers are on information overload and just want to be told what we find works best […] my job is not just to inform customers but also not to confuse them with information that in the end might ultimately put them in an antenna I dont think is as good. […] i agree 6db is a lot but if the mobilemark was performing 10db lower anyway it was moot because i was still up 4db in the aggregate.”

Parsec: “You wouldn’t choose the Husky antenna if you only needed 2X2 LTE.”

So MMH knows the antenna isn’t truly omnidirectional when used in a 2x2LTE modem, but since it works better than a competing product so say that it’s omnidirectional… which is true if using a single modem, but at the time they were selling it in a bundle with the max transit duo and still promote it as being omnidirectional with two modem routers.

Not very confidence inducing. Kind of seems like one guy that got a cert and hired a bunch of his RV buddies?

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Easton here with MMH.

In the 4.5 years since your interactions with us, we have continued to prove ourselves as a trusted partner to mobile data users all around the country. We have a growing team of agents with a robust variety of technical backgrounds that help support our offerings. I have personally managed the support department over the last 3 years and stand by our ability to resolve a wide variety of customer issues. The PrimeCare issue you mention would be an easy solve for my team. We process PrimeCare renewals daily.

Regarding your comment about using the Husky antenna in a dual modem LTE deployment, you bring up some good technical considerations. As you know, mobile internet is quite the rabbit hole and no amount of details added to our listings could possibly cover all the information that a customer might find relevant. The best we can do for our customers is test our solutions, make sure they work in a real-world setting, and distill that information down to something digestible. The vast majority of customers appreciate our bundled recommendations. Those who want to dive even further can do so via the immense library of resources we and our partners at MIRC provide.

A full breakdown of this exact topic can be found in the member section of MIRC’s review of the Husky antenna: https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/gear/review-husky-omni-directional-antenna-by-parsec-cellular-antenna/

On the topic of your use case, RoamLink is a great option for your needs within the US. If you are interested in exploring our multi carrier MVNO, you can learn all about our current plan offerings from our recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmWV1KV_eSU

Thanks, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly with any questions or needs. Happy traveling!

Easton Douglas | Customer support manager
MobileMustHave

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Was this written by ChatGPT?

So… your words vs my actual experience. Your company was marketing itself in the same manner back then.

Your support was literally repeatedly arguing it was my fault we were without cloudfusion for weeks. The burden should not be on paying customers to train support staff. Frontier proactively stepped in to actually fix the issue, and they felt bad enough about the entire situation they offered some compensation, unlike the company that actually wasted my time.

Again, no remorse or apology on behalf of your company (though this was outside of the time you worked there). You’re not disputing this happened, but you signed up here to make this post a PR spin. This says a lot.

We stopped buying Primecare from MMH and started getting it directly from Peplink but were dissapointed we were still locked into MMH for first tier tech support.

Your wiring documention page for the Parsec Husky recommends LTE1&2 on modem 1 and LTE3&4 on modem 2. This clashes with my memory - each antenna has almost 180 degree coverage, so splitting them gets you near something omnidirectional. v4 of Parsec’s manual from 2024 backs this up doing 1+3 and 2+4 unless I’m reading things wrong.

Ok, but if you tell explicitly someone a setup is omnidirectional, and it isn’t, they won’t think about directionality if they’re in a marginal location.

Your digestible distillation is factually incorrect. Something along the lines of “in most circumstances running this antenna on a 2 modem router is effectively omni-directional but there are some small gaps where the signal will be noticeably weaker” off the top of my head would be accurate and not overly complicated.

Parsec told me to contact the seller for the actual diagram of antenna coverage and a “senior specialist” at MMH had no idea how to access that information.

I assume that’s the one I participated in back when. Not a paying member now as our setup has been static for quite a while.

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I’ve been happy with Peplink/Frontier support - while they couldn’t diagnose the odd modem + resets/hangs on the older firmware they looked into it and put some effort into it, along with me testing out some beta firmware.

It wasn’t resolved iirc because our support plan didn’t cover us having a hot swap replacement, and they wanted us to mail it in for diagnostics and then they could fix it or mail it back. I think at one point we had an offer of a $30 fee to hotswap to a new router, but at that point it was stable on the older firmware and we were moving around enough + my partner actively working off of it to make that more uncertainty.

Maybe I’ll re-open that since it’s a little less critical now, we’ve had it fail to recognize SIMs (with a different error message than we’d seen before) a few months ago, though a reset (with no physical jostling or changing of SIMs etc) solved the issue. It only happens every few months and the really bad regression was fixed by firmware 8.4 (we skipped 8.2.x and 8.3.x) and are on 8.5.x now.

There was one moment where a tech told me that the reason we were having issues with speed fusion was because we had never used it (our modems were on a different priority at the time). Looking at the balance remaining showed that to be incorrect, as it was very clearly not a clean number.

I’ve emailed parsec about the wiring for the husky on two modem routers, there’s text on the bottom of page 6 that recommends pairing cell 1 and 2, then 3 and 4, but the tables around it indicate the opposite.

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Update: heard back from Parsec. the pairings on the MMH support page were accurate, but according to their engineers only using two antennas per modem it “should” have omnidirectional support but performance will vary depending on the angle as the unit was designed to use all four antennas on a modem. There’s definitely been a few times in marginal spots where reparking slightly helped - not something I obsess about or bother with on a normal basis, but it’s good to actually know that’s a potential issue instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

Another MMH support fail - at one point in diagnosing the hard freezes / resets on 8.2 firmware we they explicitly asked to log into the modem on firmware 8.2 and change configuration settings WHILE MY PARTNER WAS ON A WORK CALL.

I obviously refused - compromising her business by a) moving back onto a known broken firmware release while working b) changing configuration settings during her call that could cause drops or further inconsistency.

Sure it’s simpler on their side to troubleshoot, but obviously zero actual concern about the real impacts to her business from the product they sold and are “supporting”. Some basic consideration would have led to asking if we could set up a dummy call during downtime they could monitor and play with. We were obviously back on the 8.1.x firmware while actually working, then testing 8.2.x beta releases when escalated to peplink. Eventually we just gave up and kept it on 8.1.x until 8.4.x came out (which we obviously extensively tested for stability before running while she was working).

FYI - At the time we would have had to mail the unit out, have it tested, then gotten it back or a replacement but not had anything to work from. By the time peplink offered the $30 mail a new one shipping would have been an issue and it was simpler just to stay on 8.1.x which was stable (I was burnt out from all the tech support comms over that period). We’re currently paying for the primecare that allows for a unit to be sent before your old one is returned, but again it’s “good enough” for now and it’s kind of hard to actually prove an intermittent issue aside from screenshots and previous remote diagnostics didn’t show anything.

Multiple SIMs in that modem won’t be recognized until a hard restart (with varying error messages), and resets on it take like 5 minutes vs a minute and a half on the other modem. That said it still works and my partner is change adverse so doesn’t want to swap it as it works. It’s taken a long time to get her comfortable with the idea of switching to starlink as a main, though she’s used it in a residential setup before.

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@DaveZ US Mobile is actively cracking down on router IMEI’s - even at just their hotspot limits the premium plan would be a great deal, standard priority and 100GB on one network and 50GB on the two others for ~$32 a year.

TMO -might- work just as a low trickle FEC alternative, but the was only one or two locations where it wasn’t the worst network for us so having that as our fallback doesn’t make sense.

Starlink works well unobstructed even when it’s facing 180deg away from where it wants to be, had a 1 sec loss every 40 minutes or so and that was just on the dashboard through the windshield.

There’s two major options I see, which we’ll need to test and play around with:

  1. we mainly use starlink unbonded, occasionally bond it with cellular FEC when there’s heavy weather or minor obstructions, then fall back to cellular when heavily obstructed. right now there’s two spots my partner works out of that are obstructed, but we’d have easy alternatives to them. in theory there’d be some campgrounds that i’d be good to make calls from. in this case get a mini 5g and peplink eSIMs. bonus for this is it’d work in canada, which is a telecomm black hole for router IMEIs.

  2. we always bond starlink when she’s working, then rarely run off of cellular. In this case a MMH roamlink flex plan would be our best bet. Unfortunately their website is a bit ambiguous and inconsistent - in one place it’s mentioned that the rollover only carries over for one month, in a product slide it implies rollover never expires but is capped to 3x the monthly limit. They also mention being able top up, but require a login to their portal to actually see how much top-ups cost? Perhaps these are covered in the 20 minute youtube video @Easton_Douglas linked but I’d expect them to be documented.

I generally just work from coworking spaces/ cafes / libraries while my partner takes over my van - I provide the tech support for her but don’t actually use any of this data in a critical manner. Our downtime is generally in the backcountry vs hanging out car camping, so internet in evenings is nice but not like a typical RV person (we do ~20 backpacking trips a year, probably 4-5 long weekends of basecamping dayhikes).

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For the RoamLink Flex plans, the monthly data that gets added may be carried over up to three months total, including the current month. So, if you had a 100gb flex plan, you could accumulate as much as 300gbs “in the bank”. Then, on your fourth month, your oldest 100gbs (or whatever is left of that cycle) will drop off as a new 100gbs gets added. You will always use your oldest data first.

At the time of writing this, top up options include 20gbs/$40, 40gbs/$80, and 60gbs/$120.

Best,

Easton Douglas | Customer support manager
MobileMustHave