Novice needs advice on balancing T-Mobile 100GB cellular plan and DSL

Product Discussion Pepwave MAX
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I live in a rural area that only has DSL, line of sight broadband, sattelite, or 5G gateway services available. My home’s location rules out line of sight, and I’m averse to satellite. For 3+ years I had a T-Mobile gateway that worked really well. About a month ago it simply stopped working consistently, which is a problem because my wife and I work from home.

After repeated unproductive calls to T-Mobile I speed checked our 5G phones (which were normally on WiFi calling) and it was apparent the 5G signal itself was an issue in the sense that internet access would be virtually non-existent. Switching to LTE on the phones got us on the internet but I didn’t have a whole home solution. And the T-Mobile gateway didn’t work, I presume, because it was utilizing the 5G signal.

I bought a Peplink BR1 Pro Max 5G and got a 100GB T-Mobile SIM plan. I checked the nearest tower bands on cellmapper.net and locked the BR1 on LTE 2, 12, 66 and 71. I am getting really good speeds, both up and down. But, I was too stupid to realize it was eating through the 100GB plan at a rapid pace, primarily with the Roku TV. I then reduced the bandwidth to 2mbps up and down for every device on the BR1, still eating through ~5GB a day.

Now (finally) to my question - I have a DSL service and modem on order. They claim 10 down, 1 up. Is there an optimal way to configure the cellular and DSL on the BR1 so I can get decent download and upload (especially for Teams meetings) without going over on the cellular plan? If I look at download/upload status on the T-Mobile SIM card the upload GB utilization is a tenth of the download. Maybe I could leverage the upload of the SIM and the download of the DSL? Looking for advice both philosophically as well as BR1 configuration suggestions.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

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Assign all of your devices specific IP addresses and start writing an outbound policy that pushes streaming to the DSL circuit and allow everything else to utilize both links. Here’s what I’d recommend…

Streaming devices - Set a Priority rule → DSL with fail over to T-Mobile, then add a bandwidth restriction of 6Mbps → Define their subset of IP’s as Guests and give guests a individual bandwidth limit of 6Mpbs.

You can do more complicated things after that if you like to tinker, but easy answer… Lowest Latency / Auto (which is the default policy Peplinks ship with) for everything else.

Basic philosophy here is send all the heavy usage devices to DSL, freeing up the other link to be used when needed. There are definitely more complicated answers, but simply just monitor who on your network is using the most traffic and direct them to the slow DSL links.

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That sounds straightforward enough. DSL gets turned on Thursday, so I’ll give it a shot as soon as they leave. Much appreciated!

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