I have learned a lot from this community when setting up my MAX BR1 Mini (cat7) for my RV two years ago and I am returning here as it was the first place that came to mind to get some insights into this new problem that arose this weekend.
First a bit of background:
We just recovered from a severe storm in Western Washington toppling many trees and taking down as many power lines. Our town (population ~40,500 near Seattle) was hit with a 4+ days power outage and this includes Comcast losing service which is still not back up.
Our business (restaurant) uses Comcast Business internet with their Connect Pro service (CradlePoint with Verizon sim).
This has worked for most common scenarios (Comcast losing internet for minutes to an hour or so) for a small group of their customers.
With Comcast having a bit of a monopoly in our area, after the storm 7000+ accounts were without internet just in our zipcode. So all businesses failed over to Verizon, many residential (Xfinity) customers hopped on their smartphone hotspots and this has now been going on for days.
With the cell towers overloaded with all these devices pulling data, download speeds are at best 0.5 - 1mbps and upload hover around 100kbps and latency is anywhere between 800-5000ms. So it is very hard to keep our POS and other connected devices (like a VOIP phone) running.
Everyone has full bar connections to the towers, but the uplinks were not made for the sudden wave of devices.
When power was back Saturday we were ready to open, but the lack of internet was holding us back as phone and online orders wouldn’t work.
T-Mobile on my phone was a bit better and I grabbed an Ethernet to USB-C dongle and plugged my phone into the CradlePoint’s ethernet port for the Comcast modem. We were back up and running.
Come Sunday and T-Mobile has the same issues as Verizon with terrible connectivity. I noticed my car’s AT&T connection was rock solid next to the building so I got a Redpocket e-sim for a 5Gb hotspot and we were set. Later that afternoon T-Mobile recovered and Verizon is still terrible.
I know this situation is not common (it was called a once in a decade storm…).
However with the BR1 in my RV with 2 SIMs I was swapping carriers when needed. So I thought it might be worth exploring a Peplink solution.
So here is the idea:
We don’t need sub-second failovers and rather not pay and manage 3 different accounts to have access to all carriers in our area.
A BR1 Mini with a Peplink multi carrier eSim looks very interesting and I would trust that better than Comcast’s current backup solution.
So based on above scenario, do you think this setup would have magically switched between the 3 carriers to find one that gives us a stable connection this weekend or would it happily stick to Verizon as it had full bars?
Two concerns that popped up:
I assume that a multi carrier sim show up as one sim in the Peplink software, so what options do I have left to configure health checks? Or is that out of my control?
In a normal setup like with my BR1 with 2 physical sims I would have setup a
a ping test with a 5 second timeout after x times as that should identify a serious issue with the carrier’s network as I saw this weekend.
However to my surprise running manual tests across these carriers I could still end up with a ‘good’ connection that also happened to be very slow causing issues down the line. Curious if people ran into this and have solutions to better identify healthy connections (lower pings/decent bandwidth).
