Max HD2 Cellular Connectivity Issues - Europe

[SlapBassist]

I recently purchased a Max HD2 with world wide 4G Advanced support. I have been trying unsuccessfully to connect to Orange over in France using some prepaid sim cards that I purchased from an Orange store. There are many issues that I’ve run into doing this, as listed below:

1. It seems that only the 2nd sim slot in my HD2 is working properly and connecting to the Orange network. The 1st slot always gets stuck on Obtaining IP Address.

2. The 2nd sim slot on my HD2 was continuously giving “Obtaining IP Address” until I finally manually entered in the APN settings with:

APN: orange.fr
Username: orange
Password: orange

If I do not enter this in, or the APN is just orange, it gets stuck at “Obtaining IP Address”.

3. Even after I finally get the 2nd sim slot to make the connection, after updated the APN settings, the connection speed is horrendous, averaging around .5 Mbps and with a extremely slow ping rate. I am able to bring up some websites, but at near Edge level connection speeds.

4. The signal strength for both sim cards is very good, so it doesn’t appear to be an issue here.

That being said, I have a USB stick that I purchased here in France and have tried all the sim cards I have in it, and it connects perfectly fine to the Orange network when slotted in the HD2. The speeds are fine as well. So this is not an issue with the sims, but seems to be an issue with either the HD2 configuration or the actual HD2 itself. There’s definitely an issue with my 1st sim slot and to give a little more insight into this, when I tried registering it with Verizon back in the states they said the IMEI was not in their system, so something is off about this HD2. When I was informed this, I contacted my reseller 3gstore, who in turn contacted Peplink, who supposedly fixed this issue as the IMEI was not submitted properly to Verizon. I’m not sure if this explains any of the issues I am seeing or not with the 1st slot.

Thanks,

Jeff

[TK_Liew]

You may refer to the troubleshooting steps below in future for cellular related issue.

Pepwave BR1 - Cellular Firmware Reinstall

@kenichiwa, please help open ticket. I understand your pain. Certain recovery can be done by tech support. We do have US support team to cover your timezone. Cellular firmware recovery is not straightforward. In fact, not every of your cases is related to the cellular module. Below are the steps I provided in the ticket which allow you to do the problem isolation. Ensure the SIM card is tested and working fine with another cellular router at the same location. If it is not a new SIM card, ma…

I notice you have opened ticket. Our technical support will follow up with.

[SlapBassist]

It looks like I’ve managed to resolve most of the connectivity issues. It appears to have been a combination of the cellular antennas and the APN settings. First it’s definitely important to get the APN settings correct, otherwise it just won’t make the proper connection. It appears that the proper APN for these sims is orange.fr, as validated against my USB stick. That being said, the biggest issue I was having was related to 2 bad antennas that I had, one was connected to sim 1 and the other to sim 2. For some reason although the signal strength was very high, it was unable to continue with the connection because of antenna issues. Better status messages would be great in this regard, if possible. Once I swapped out the antennas both cellular modules appear to be working properly.

I am still having issues updating the cellular module firmware, which I have opened up a separate ticket via 3gstore to address. But this is less of a priority.

Thanks,

Jeff