I am new here and I have a new Max Transit. I also have an Ipad with cellular capabilities with a MintMobile SIM. I did a speed test with the sim in my ipad and it wasn’t great (4.0Mbps down and 3.2Mbps up), but when I put that sim in the transit and turned off the cellular on my ipad, then connected my ipad to the Transit wifi and ran another speed test it was worse (1.8Mbps down and 3.5Mbps up). What happened, or more importantly what can I do to fix this? Both tests were done in my house, so it’s possible an outside antenna would help, but the same sim in 2 devices should have similar results. Besides the Transit has antennas that the ipad does not. Should I have enabled/disabled something?
Thank you
Which version of the MAX Transit do you have?
You should test it a handful of times throughout the day as even sequential speedtests can be different.
I’m on cable and Speedtest.net says I have 233.20Mbps, fast.com says 210Mbps
Same tests run again immediately after say 227.35Mbps & 190Mbps
Also Phones and tablets behave differently when on cellular compared to wifi. On cellular some things get disabled (like drop box uploads) but these kick off again when the connect via wifi.
Login to your transit and look at the status, real time usage reports and keep that tab open as you run your speedtests to see actual througput.
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Hi Martin,
Product Code: MAX-TST-GLTE-G-T-PRM
Hardware Revision: 2
Firmware: 8.0.2s046 build 4437
Do you need anything else for the version?
My latest speedtest.net result is 2.64 down and 3.66 up. Still below the tablet numbers. I’ll try again at different times of the day, but it feels pretty consistent that the sim while in the tablet, gets better speeds than in the transit, and that feels wrong since the transit has antenna’s and should at least match.
I was camping this last weekend and had the transit out for it’s first test and even though the dashboard showed 4 and sometimes 5 bars with LTE-A, I was seeing the throughput at 20 kbps through 120 kbps on that dashboard page. Really sad and unusable. I know the bars don’t tell the whole story, but I had a good signal and extremely awful bandwidth.
I’ve opened up the Real-Time status and reran the speedtest, and the stats showed just over 600kpbs down. That’s not good and the speedtest results didn’t match. I have watched Prime video on this tablet and streaming over cellular with this sim and it worked fine in the city and I’m in the same place now. I can’t place my finger on it, but the sim/speed seems slower in the transit.
On the “Dashboard” page down in the Device Information box I see the line that says “Throughput”. Is that related to this? It doesn’t seem to match any other values in this testing. It seems to show in kbps and not Mbps, but it did come up to Mbps while running the speedtest. The Throughput during speedtest showed 2.19Mbps down and 86.0 kbps up. But the speedtest results showed 3.82Mbps down and 4.92 Mbps up.
Thanks
No - that’s good, I wanted to check you had the CAT18 modem.
So long as the transit is using the same frequencies as the tablet, and you haven’t got every inline traffic management feature enabled on the transit (firewall, content blocking, DPI etc) which might slow thngs down, then I see no reason why the Transit shouldn’t perform as well as the tablet.
If you look about on the forum here you’ll find a couple of ‘my phone is faster than my router’ threads and these normally end up being a bad hardware comparison (because the phone has a much faster modem that the Peplink its being compared to), or a mobile network issue where the transit is told to use different frequencies or has different network prioritisation by the tower / mobile network than the phone.
Signal strength (RSSI) isn’t everything. Look at RSRP and RSRQ as your signal quality indicators. The throughput on the dashboard page is a snapshot in time measurement. The real time graphs on the status page are the accurate measure of throughput.
I think you likely need to gather some evidence (regular speedtests and use InCOntrol2 to monitor signla measurements whilst stationary for a few days) to be sure there is a speed issue. Once you are sure, log a ticket withe engineering with your findings.
There is also this thread that might be applicable to you if you are in the US? US Data Plan on LTE CAT-18 Models
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I have the same router that I’ve used with two SIMs from two carriers. One had dismal speeds in the router but decent speeds in a hotspot. I called the provider and it turns out the SIM was not to be used in a Peplink router. The other SIM from a different provider had to be provisioned to work correctly. It might be worth exploring. Keep plugging away at it, it’s a great router as long as your providers and your account will work with it.
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Hi @teksaport, I recommend to contact MintMobile and ask them if they even support you moving the SIM over to a commercial router.
The carriers know right away when you do this because the IMEI changes when you insert the SIM in another device.
They will then impose restrictions because the SIM is meant to be used in a tablet or smartphone and not in a commercial router.
Unfortunately the carriers want you to use a more expensive data plan where you pay for a fixed allotment of data (like 5 or 10GB) and then an overage fee for each extra GB used.
Thanks
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I can’t be certain that the transit is using the same frequencies as the tablet since I’m not sure where I would find that in the tablet. But it’s possible that my comparison isn’t accurate due to prioritization issues.
I am in the US and that thread you sent me to sounds similar to my issues and my sim is through a Tmobile reseller so who knows for sure except for them.
Thanks for your help
When you say “was not to be used”, why did they say that? Was it like a cell phone only plan?
I’ll try calling Mint and see what they say, since they didn’t ask up front I figured it didn’t matter what it was in.
Thanks
They didn’t prohibit it, but they told me up front that it would either be very slow or not work at all. They were right.
Many providers (Xfinity Mobile) will allow full speed bandwidth from “on device” and traffic detected to be “off device” is throttled to 500kb.
Carriers utilize different methods to ‘inspect’ traffic as it flows, and if the indicators are that the traffic is not coming from “off device” this is treated as “hotspot traffic”.
If you saw degraded performance over time it could be because Mint allows X-amount of hotspot data at full speed until it then throttles it to 2G/3G.
A way to reproduce the traffic pattern and properly compare the performance of both devices would be to turn on the iPad hotspot feature and speedtest using it.
I believe one way around that issue I describe would be to fully encrypt ALL traffic leaving the Peplink which will prevent the carrier from detecting that traffic is “off device”.
Hi Eric, yes I tried the speedtest from the ipad and then from the peplink from the same sim and the same location within minutes of each other and the speed on the peplink was 1/2 of what it was on the ipad. I can and I have reproduced this enough times to know it’s true in my situation.
I don’t think it was due to a “performance over time” since I hadn’t been using my ipad and the Mint data for a couple of weeks. So it was pretty obvious to me that (T-mobile) was restricting my bandwidth.
I don’t know how to encrypt all traffic out of the peplink unless its over a vpn and I don’t have another peer to setup a vpn to.
Thanks