I am using a 5G modem as one of my WAN connections a Peplink B-One (great product!) and it appears the cellular carrier is applying some some sort of session duration cap. After around 10 to 20 hours, the cellular modem doesn’t lose connection, but existing clients start to get severely throttled (see attached WAN Quality screenshot). The only manual and short-term fix is to either (1) unplug the WAN cord from the B-One for around 15 minutes or (2) power-cycle the cellular modem.
I’ve tightened the WAN Health Check config as much as possible (shortest timeout, check interval, check retries + longest recovery retries) but that doesn’t bring down the WAN connection long enough for the cellular modem to recycle the session.
Any ideas for how I can use the WAN Health Check to disable the WAN connection for ≈ 15 minutes (or somehow trigger a power-cycle of the cellular modem)?
THANKS in advance for your assistance!!
Tricky. You could configure a scheduled reboot once a day in the early hours of the morning which is the easiest way.
If you want to be more precise you could theoretically set up hourly connection test in InControl that runs speedtests automatically and if the speedtest is much lower than expected trigger cellular modem reset via the device api.
Thanks @MartinLangmaid !!
I’ve tried that in the past, and it just so happens that if I (auto)reboot the 5G modem or my Peplink router while the connection is good, sometimes it comes back online to a worse connection.
I’ve done some additional testing, and noticed that when the 5G connection degrades, the modem is connecting to a different cell tower in the area than the closest/faster tower. My hunch is that the closest tower kicks off any connections after the session limit is hit, and so then the further away tower picks up the connection.
So auto-rebooting the equipment is a poor solution here because it can sometimes switch the modem off the faster tower and onto the slower tower. Which leads me back to my initial question of trying to figure out how to trigger the modem reset dynamically / conditionally.
What would be the feature / mechanism in InControl whereby I could setup the hourly connection test?
Connection Tests under Network Settings at a group level
Lets you create a Speedtest bandwidth test at a frequency that suits you.
And then in notifications at the group level you can tick to get notified (via email, or HTPS push) on a Connection Test Fail event.
