I’m running a Pepwave BR1 Mini 4G and having all bad luck with cellular carriers. T-Mobile was no good (couldn’t even get an IP address). Verizon connects but is super slow, like 2MBPS when it should be at least 20 at 4G?
Thinking about trying AT&T, but wonder if anyone has any tips for evaluating that prior to purchase. Would anyone here know of an AT&T data plan that will work wi5 the pepwave br1 mini?
FWIW: T-mobile has been working well for us, with a variety of Peplink equipment. The one thing it simply would not do, is to connect using a CAT-18 modem (that is unlikely to be your issue, though).
Both Verizon and T-Mobile can be sensitive to traffic congestion - one of our sites is in a National Park, and we can tell from the connection speeds when the work-day begins, and in particular when the tourists are in season (e.g., during weekends). It can vary from 5Mbps during the day to >100Mbps after midnight.
Nothing we can do about that, aside from using multiple carriers and lines.
What does occasionally work is to limit what bands the tower connects to. E.g, at one of our locations, disabling some of the bands, forcing the tower to a particular band, increased the speed ten-fold (from 2 Mbps (miserable) to 20+ Mbps (tolerable)) .
Our experience with TMO and VZW suggests that they employ different traffic shaping algorithms (for the plans that we use). VZW is often significantly better for uploads, whereas TMO is (usually) somewhat better for downloads. Antennas matter, we scored a significant improvement when we moved to the peplink dome antennas.
So, we combine VZW and TMO lines whenever we can, for increased resilience as well as enabling playing games with the combination of the traffic shaping. (Not that we do much of the latter.)
Re. AT&T? No experience to offer, unfortunately.
W.r.t. testing a carrier before committing: In some jurisdictions (such as ours) you have a right to cancel within the first 30 days.
Good luck!
Z
I have setup and managed a large grouping of Peplink routers all of which are using multi-carrier and in some cases terrestrial connectivity as well. Currently the majority of the equipment is operating using 4G as we have not had the available funding to move towards 5G. At least eight of my mobile sites are running four carriers: AT&T FirstNet, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint (now part of T-Mobile). All of our units are on the public safety plans so we have a little bit more control than others. The rest of my sites are running AT&T FirstNet and Verizon. Our primary site running with a Balance 2500 for the SpeedFusion is using a Frontier 2x2Gbps Fiber with static IP, AT&T Commercial 10x10Gbps, AT&T FirstNet, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint connections.
You absolutely should check your cellular coverages (don’t use marketing maps they lie) you need to gain access from tested sources or from the engineers to get the correct cellular service ot the units. In every single unit we have except our hard case tactical units we are not using the antennas included with the devices, we are using a Panorama gain antenna and in some cases panel antennas to aim our signal to different sites.