Hello,
New Peplink user here…RVer “graduating” from a WiFiRanger product. Bought a Surf Soho for the home to get familiar with the software/UI, and love it so far. I have two live hotspots (cat16 & cat18) connected and hot failover is very quick! This configuration works well at home but I would like to be able to use 4x4 mimo antennas on the roof of the RV, and the two hotspots are limited to two antenna ports each anyway. Preliminary testing indicates using the 2x mimo slows down the connection, so I’m thinking of a different solution.
Considering the purchase of the Max Transit Cat18 (for use in the RV), paired with a MobileMark 7in1 roof-mounted antenna with 4x LTE cables (and 2x wifi). I realize I’m going from two hotspot modems down to one embedded modem, but with the benefit of roof-mounted 4x mimo, more band options, etc.
I know a failover (or manually triggering a SIM card change) will cause a delay while the modem switches carriers, but if performance is really good, I can probably live with that. (think arriving at new campground location)
What can I reasonably expect in terms of switchover time (reboot required?) from this single modem configuration?
Can this be triggered from within the Pepwave IOS utility?
Wow, 5 minutes? I believe the Duo has two modems so wouldn’t you have an immediate hot failover to the other modem? I wasn’t referring to physically swapping the cards in and out of the router.
@JimA, correct, that’s why I went with the Duo. I can disable and re-enable each modem in a matter of seconds to verify connectivity independently, but I have primary and secondary SIMs in both modems. I spend most of my time on the primary SIMs, but occasionally switch to the backup SIMs to verify they’re still good. I have Verizon in modem1 and AT&T in modem2, and the secondary SIMs are on the same carriers, so that switch is much quicker, but switching carriers takes about 5 min.
@foretm sorry, but I’m still confused. So, if you only had a VZ sim in one modem and ATT sim in the other modem (no backups sims) it would take 5 minutes to change carriers? But that’s only if you don’t have it set up for hot failover, right?
No… with dual modems, if one dies the other takes over. I can disable one modem manually in seconds and have it move to the other. But in your case, with only one modem, switching sims takes about 5 minutes. I didn;t mean to confuse you, I was just saying that I have the Max Transit but its the Duo version, and this is why i went with the Duo. so I don’t have to wait 5 minutes to switch carriers.
Specifically my setup is:
Modem #1 - VZW SIM in slot A and VZW SIM in slot B
Modem #2 - AT&T SIM in slot A and AT&T SIM in slot B
For me to switch from VZW to AT&T failover or disabling one modem or the other… seconds.
For me to switch SIM from A to B on the same carrier… about 1 minute
For me to switch SIM from A to B with different carrier… about 5 minutes
As a result of the third line above, I put my secondary/backup SIMs in the same modem as the primary SIMs, so switching SIMs doesn’t force the modem to reset to a different carrier and take as long. suffice to say, with a single modem you will be down for a few minutes while the modem reconfigures itself to a different SIM, especially if its to a different carrier.
Ah, okay, now I understand. Thank you so much for the additional detail, that really cleared it up for me. Five minutes is longer than I anticipated. I need to give this some more thought.
I ordered a MaxTransit CAT18 in Feb that is due to be delivered early next week. I’m an RV’r as well. I am about to start a thread called “MaxTransit CAT18 with WAN hotspot” that you might want to look at. I’m not so concerned about failover time between SIM’s, but an thinking about using another hotspot on the WAN port to give me some failover using the load balancing… not sure how that will work so will be looking for input. I’ve ordered the same attenna as you have.
5G store. Ordered Feb 27th or thereabouts. They kept pushing back delivery due to factory production backlogs (pretty sure the contract mfg is in China).