Newbie struggling with internet dropping

I am using AT&T on a MAX HD1 Dome CAT18 and a MAX Transit CAT18 and have not seen this happen. My plan is through Nomad Internet, and I have been using the SIM/connection for the last 3 weeks without issue continuously.

The plan is a membership/pre-paid through them, and is designed to be used in a hotspot or mobile router.

I’m in the San Juan Islands in northern Washington State if that helps in terms of regional issues.

I am also using a DNS Lookup Health check, and have this connection as part of a SpeedFusion tunnel for redundancy. I’ve seen it fail for other reasons (signal level) but never gotten into a situation where it has passed health checks and not passed traffic or some other hybrid.

The current AT&T issue seems to block HTTP/HTTPS traffic, but already established SpeedFusion tunnels seem to stay up and functional even once the outage kicks in.

It would be interesting to see if your AT&T connection has any issues if you try it without the tunnel active.

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OK. The reason I ask is that using some “phone SIMs” and AT&T’s “tablet plans” are a “known issues.” The latter are available pre-paid for about $35/month – formerly unlimited and now capped at 25 gB/month. Lots of E-Bay sellers have been selling them with “special” IMEIs. Sometimes they work; sometimes not. When they don’t it’s not a “router issue.” So the salient question for your vendor is something like “is this plan approved by AT&T for use in a router?”

Now, as for @mystery’s situation – that’s waaaay different. Certainly nothing goofy about that – although I remain a bit more than suspicious of AT&T generally.

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All of our plans are data-only business lines directly with AT&T - and they are experiencing this issue.

And we’ve now heard from dozens of others having this problem as well - and it seems to be impacting both plans direct with AT&T as well as plans via resellers.

I am amazed that AT&T has let such a major glitch linger for so long without addressing it.

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I would highly recommend filing a complaint with AT&T executives / executive customer service. They can get the higher level technical teams engaged.

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@Technomadia: Yes. I could not agree more. My question was directed to (via reply to) @Matthew_Rice to help me get a better understanding of the issues folks are having and to help eliminate issues that could be related to “wrong plan for its intended purpose, etc.” I completely agree with you. The conclusion that AT&T has some serious issues is absolutely inescapable. Once we eliminate the possibility of bad SIM, inappropriate plan, bad hardware, etc., there is not much left. And, the voices of many can’t be ignored. We’re not dealing with an occasional isolated case here.

@mystery’s idea is good in principle but it will take a major customer (not with just a few dozen “lines”) to get their attention. I am not optimistic in the short term. (Maybe the folks who are in charge of network management are also responsible for their web site? :face_vomiting:)

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I disagree. I had one line and got their attention without issue. The office of the CEO contacted me and did a good job escalating and following up. Another option is also filing a FCC complaint but that might piss them off.

Well, let’s just say our experiences differ. We’ve been 'round this course many times over more than two decades. But your experience is instructive – glad there was some success!

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For what it’s worth, I have an AT&T data plan via OTR Mobile and have not had issues with a dropped connection. My router is the MAX BR1 Classic.

Are you using the APN b2b.static or broadband?

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cellular seems stable today… very weird… outside temps are lower than the 100-ish they were past couple weeks… wonder if its temp related or tower…

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Yup, I knew that things were more stable with the tunnels, but that’s my default configuration due to redundancy requirements during the week.

I’ve been running now for about 24 hours without SpeedFusion or any other tunnels. No issues or failures both at the client end or in any logs anywhere. I’m using AT&T provided by Nomad Internet in an MAX HD1 CAT18 Dome.

I use broadband

if this were all users there would be an uproar, no? is it be a combination of factors impacting only a small subset of users? how widely has this been reported?

as a test i replaced one of my pep’s this weekend w/ another router (same antennas & sim) and it hasn’t gone down (yet) whereas my pep has several times since.

this new test setup has less usage, it has one user, directly wired into the modem’s lan vs. the pep with 2 users off access points wired into the modem… but then my pep has gone down overnight with zero users on the network too.

it is way too early to say this new setup won’t go down, but it has been weeks since i’ve gone more than 6 hours without a problem.

i’ve reached out to my att biz rep to let them know i’m having problems and see if they are aware of anything (not holding my breath, they aren’t very responsive)

and also a huge thank you @Technomadia - your website https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/ is amazing; i have a stationary setup, but i learned more about what i needed reading your guides than anywhere else on the internet. it is an awesome resource and i’m proud to be a member - keep up the great work!

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Another day and things are still stable for me.

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Wish I could say the same! I’m changing providers because I can’t work this way.

i think it just happened. speedfusion tunnel remained active. all other internet traffic ceased to work directly over the cellular link. cellular connection looked fine. nothing in event log. had to drag the cellular connection to disabled and back to priority 1 to get traffic flowing again. very strange.

We’re you using the 8.1 firmware that was just released?

one of the RC not final

@mystery,

You can try the below to isolate the issue :

  1. You mentioned when the issue happen , SpeedFusion connection is not affected, you can test forward all traffics into the SpeedFusion tunnels instead of directly route via the Cellular WAN , this should able to bypass the issue.

  2. Try to set the WAN health check using HTTP, this will able to trigger the WAN health check failed and the cellular connection will be reset like 5 minutes when WAN health check is failed. This should able to force the cellular WAN to reconnect (may need your help to confirm this)

The above just a temporary workaround until service provider fix the issue

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