Hi Everybody,
May I ask for some help and advices please?
So, we are using Pepwave Max HD 4 and two BR1 paired with local sim cards data only with full
4G speed subscription. Since beginning we are getting speeds that are not even close to 4G. As we were docked in small town, conclusion was it is local network, but just got down to the Med and still,
nothing changed. Done speed tests in France with local SFR sim cards, and in Italy with Vodafone IT. For both my phone would give me at least 40, 50 Mb in download while on all three Papwaves couldn’t get more than 7, 8 Mb. That was done from ship’s WiFi followed by Kerio and switches. After, I’ve done more tests plugged directly to Pepwave lan, but same result. Within 20 attempts only once managed to get 35 Mb in download, 15 out of 20, around 7,8 Mb , and also few times not even 2, 3 Mb. I understand that system depends on local network being used at the moment, but still, there must be something which is not completely right. For all test done on Pepwave, was getting 40 megs easy on my mobile device.
Any ideas ?
Cheers all !
Marko
1 Like
Similar issue with Surf SOHO. Download speed is only 2/3 of rated speed where simple consumer router shows full speed. I should say this in brand new MK3 unit, HW 1 with v8.0 f/m.
Hi Marko - welcome to the forum!
This happens a lot. I get calls about under performing Marine installs at least every other month where a captain or AV/IT installer onboard who’s been grabbed by the owner and beaten for poor connectivity calls up and asks for help.
Typically - the root cause is poorly designed and installed antennas and cabling. Sometimes its crazy SIM products routing traffic to weird places. Sometimes its poor speedfusion configurations.
The way to fix this is to simplify - then test, changing one thing at a time to cancel out possible issues. So take a single BR1 identify the cause of the problems and get that to a point where its pulling 50+ Mbps like a phone then do the same for the other connections.
You could start that here in this thread and we’ll help. Or you can get in touch with me direct and we’ll do it offline as a project if you prefer.
1 Like
hi @timunfh welcome to the forum! Best you start your own post/thread as 2/3 line speed is most likely a mtu config problem (unless in your case 2/3 of rated speed is ~120Mbps in which case you’ve reached a performance limit on the SOHO).
1 Like
you need to try to compare apples-to-apples (or at least close to it), i.e.:
- MIMO v non-MIMO setup (radios/antennas)
- What bands connected to
- Signal strength being reported
- Location / LoS to cell tower
You need to compare that on the phone and Peplink device. My guess is the phone could be MIMO and your setup is not MIMO / using the aux/diversity antenna. Or you aren’t testing on the same bands. Or testing same signal strength (i.e. phone has clear LoS to tower when testing, antenna mounted to peplink device does not, or cabling run is so long its degraded).
Also some carriers throttle or deprioritize bandwidth depending on plan / device / how its being accessed. Its possible that the phone is on an unthrottled / not deprioritized plan and the sim card in the peplink device is being throttled / deprioritized.
When I see an overloaded/slow cell tower, usually I get slow speeds on both the phone and peplink. I currently only have an antenna plugged into the main connection (nothing on aux/diversity port) and my download speeds can be slower than phone without it but that is to be expected. Some times I see 10-20mbps where with the extra antenna I could be getting 30-40mbps. I actually recently saw 55mbps during off peak time on my peplink setup with only one antenna. That is a rarity. Most of the time I am in locations with overloaded cell towers and stuck at 1-2mbps if I am even lucky enough to have connectivity 
Also, do some checks during off-peak times, i.e. in the middle of the night. Remove extra variables by plugging into the enternet lan port on the peplink device when testing.
Dive into the weeds and provide some more technical data for comparison!
1 Like
