I am helping someone whose original IT person has disappeared in the wind years ago. I am trying to help them improve their network. I believe it’s a MAX BR1 MK2. It has 2 Ethernet ports, a WAN and LAN port. And 4 paddle antennae.
This has a Verizon sim and is providing backup internet here. An old apple airport extreme router is providing the Wi-Fi for it. The primary internet is a local ISP.
Question 1: Can I plug the main internet’s outgoing Ethernet into the wan port? And have the Wan port be the primary internet, that fails over to the verizon, then falls back when the main internet is online? UPDATE:: I connected the main internet to WAN and it says “Connected”, and cellular is now listed as ”Standby”! And I’m getting the faster internet speeds of the main internet, so it must be working.
Question 2: anything I should do for ideal failover/fallback configuration? Or is it just ideal with default settings?
Question 3: The Wi-Fi is slow on the Verizon cellular connection. 7 down, 1 up. Is there anything I can do to improve that? Verizon signal strength is 4/5 bars on devices here.
Question 4: Should I replace this MAX with a newer peplink? It’s 10/100 for example but the fastest internet they can have here is 45 down/ 5 up anyway.
Default will likely be fine. Sometimes I end up adjusting the healthcheck because ISPs DNS servers can be slow at times which can cause false positives.
What signal readings is the BR1 getting? Better quality signal is first step them better (higher) modem categories is how you’ll get more speed.
They will get faster speeds on cellular with a newer modem (CAT12 / CAT18 / CAT20). Or even the BR1 Pro 5G will all give faster speeds on cellular than a BR1 MK2.
Actually I prefer http lookup most of the time as it tends to be the most accurate representation of healthy internet access. Otherwise ping to google dns works well. If I was you don’t change from defaults unless you need to solve an issue.
