SOLUTION:
This is a design flaw of the Pepwave BR1 Mini. It claims to support WiFi WAN, but that is not entirely truthful on the part of PepLink. The problem is that the device has only one WiFi radio. When it uses the single radio to support both WiFi AP (broadcasting an SSID to connect clients), and WiFI WAN (connecting the BR1 to the Internet), it suffers a serious performance degradation. This device should have been designed with 2 separate WiFi radios & 2 separate WiFi antennas. There is a “work-around” that is actually fairly cheap & affective. You can buy a WiFI (extender) to Ethernet converter device from Amazon for about $45. Use that to connect to a local WiFi signal, then attach the ethernet port of the extender device to the WAN port of the Pepwave BR1 mini. My throughput went from 2-3Mbps, up to 30Mbps. IMHO it is a bit ridiculous to have to add a cheap WiFi (extender) device to a much better & more expensive device (the BR1) in order to get the much better device to actually work properly. It tells me the design engineers should have found this flaw and added another WiFi radio for $45 into the BR1 during the product development phase. I would have gladly paid a few $$ more to not have such a serious design flaw in the BR1 mini.
I hope the engineers at PepLink see this review & consider fixing such serious design flaws on future products & revisions. That being said, I think this is an excellent device - short of the one major design flaw. The device management menu & controllable features otherwise earn an A+ from me, when compared to many other network products. It is Enterprise worthy at a SOHO price.
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