Does Peplink Balance One’s USB port work with U.S. Cellular 4G-LTE Huawei E397B?
Can Peplink provide a Public IP Address for accessing WAN/LAN of Balance One’s via Cellular Modem?
U.S. Cellular Modems use randomly assigned IP address. Even when assigned IP address is known, it can not be used to connect back to modem, because of NAT being used by U.S. Cellular’s data provider. Additionally, U.S. Cellular can only provide a Static IP address for 3G connections.
I’ll let the USB driver dev team answer the question of USB modem support.
What do you need the public IP on the cellular for? Is it inbound port forwarding - if so is that for inbound load balancing where you want to use the other active WANs too using the same port(s)?
If its remote access of the balance one over cellular you can do that using remote web admin in InControl 2 - even if the USB cellular WAN is behind NAT.
If its for inbound port forwarding then you can achieve this for the NAT’d cellular WAN by hosting a FusionHub virtual appliance publicly and creating a PepVPN to it from the Balance One, but routing will get challenging if you want to do inbound load balancing across all available WAN links at the same time.
The E397 is a supported modem so it should work just fine. The IP addressing scheme is completely up to U.S. Cellular and we have no control over that. Thanks.
Need a Public IP address on the Cellular modem for Remote access of a NAS on a LAN behind Peplink BalanceOne. No load balancing. No automatic switching between working or not working connections. No switching based on Speeds or bandwidth.
Strictly a case of user being able to choose to use Main Connection or Alternate Connection to Remotely access the NAS. The Satellite connection is too slow for some usage Remote Downloads (Satellite Uploads). Whereas, Cellular connection is far to expensive for general remote usage.
Below is rough layout of Remote / WWW / WAN / LAN access
Where yyy:yyy:yyy:yyy is Persistent Public IP Address
Where xxx:xxx:xxx:xxx is Persistent or Static Public IP Address
Main Access: Remote Location <— Internet —> yyy:yyy:yyy:yyy Satellite Modem <–> WAN#1 of BalanceOne <– LAN –> Port#1 NAS
Alter Access: Remote Location <— Internet —> xxx:xxx:xxx:xxx Cellular Modem <–> USB of BalanceOne <– LAN –> Port#2 NAS
What has been tried - but fails with BalanceOne
Main Access: Remote Location <— Internet —> yyy:yyy:yyy:yyy Satellite Modem <–> WAN#1 BalanceOne <– LAN –> Port#1 NAS
Alter Access: Remote Location <— Internet —> xxx:xxx:xxx:xxx Cellular Modem - MoFi-4500 Router** <–> WAN#2 of BalanceOne <– LAN –> Port#2 NAS
***MoFi Router is used to provide a Cloud-VPN assigned Static Public IP Address. *
However, the MoFi and BalanceOne so far have not worked together. Appears to be an issue with MoFi trying to do Routing and Firewalling .vs. working like a the Satellite Modem (no routing, no firewalls - basic passthrough with NAT & DHCP information).
All attempts at setting up Port Forwarding on BalanceOne – along with Port Forwarding on MoFi, setting BalanceOne (or the NAZ) in a DMZ on MoFi, enabling IP Passthrough on MoFi, and turning off Firewall on MoFi router have failed.
The MoFi router works quite well when used by itself, in place of BalanceOne as a router. Problem comes when connecting Satellite to WAN port of MoFi router. The MoFi router will only allow Cellular Access if the Satellite connection is Down (or manually Disabled). An Exclusive OR situation.
Thus need to look at using Cellular Modem connected directly to USB port of BalanceOne and coming up with a Persistent or Static Public IP Address to remotely access the Cellular Modem.
I was wondering if Peplink had a way to setup or assign a Persistent or Static Public IP Address via a Cloud Server. MoFi router is one example of a Cloud VPN Server setup for Remote Access, whereby a Static Public IP address is assigned to ID of Router. Thus getting around problem of Cellular Company’s Data provider doing NAT that prevents remote access even when you know the Cellular modem’s current assigned IP address. A Dynamic DNS service that assigns a Name to changing assigned IP address of Ceullar modem can not get around NATing being done by Cellular company’s Data provider. Even if the Cellular provider’s Modem fully supports Dynamic DNS services. (Been there done that, with Tier-2 of Cellular provider insisting it would work, till a specialist got involved and said No.)
I have read about another service that uses Teredo tunneling for remote access. “Teredo alleviates this problem by encapsulating IPv6 packets within UDP/IPv4 datagrams, which most NATs can forward properly. Thus, IPv6-aware hosts behind NATs can serve as Teredo tunnel endpoints even when they don’t have a dedicated public IPv4 address.”