Good Morning - been struggling with repeated errors from a Balance 305, the errors that have increased with frequency are “no cable detected” & “WAN failed HTTP test”, we were using DNS for our health test, and we recently modified to HTTP test. And, of course, replaced the WAN cable. All indications point to the ISP service - correct? Sure appreciate some feedback on getting this resolved. We’ve had Comcast out 5 times, each & everytime the situation cannot be recreated & “their logs” show no events that aligned with the Balance errors.
Here’s a recent screen shot of the logs:
Our experience suggests that’s more likely an issue with the cable modem or perhaps its power supply rather than the cable. Curiosity: What cable modem are you using? Arris?
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it’s the standard issue xfinity arris black tower, I believe. And it too was replaced as recently this past week.
Yes. We’ve had “issues” with Arris cable modems and Peplink routers. A search of the forum here will reveal some of these discussions. In each and every case a change to another brand “fixed” the issue. Why? No idea. If you have an extra couple of bucks in your pocket you may want to go buy another brand and try it. The worst case is you’ll save the rental fee. (I think the last time we checked the break-even was about one year or so.) In general, I think replacing “parts” without a good justification is a bad idea. In this case we did it at least three times or so out of desperation – problem fixed.
If you decide to go this route I’d appreciate knowing of the results.
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Thanks for the input - I did look & see the hardware change has worked for you. But I am not experiencing this in the 20 to 25 other similar networks where I have the same hardware configuration.
This is seemingly well documented from the field, has Peplink addressed a resolution without necessitating a hardware modem swap? If indeed the Comcast Xfinity modems made by Arris are having compatibility issues with Balance router - wouldn’t that this be huge news considering how many Comcast devices are in place? The Balance routers are an important component in our deployments, especially for their reporting. This is where I need to roll up the sleeves & better understand this.
Hi Steve. I could not agree with you more. I’m not aware that the underlying issue has ever been identified. But I can tell you we are not making this up. 
While it certainly would have been good to understand what was going on we took a shortcut – we got rid of Arris products and the issues went away. Period. On the other hand, how many hundreds of thousands of these modems are there out there – some of which are used with Peplink routers every day?
There should be NO “compatibility” issues, of course, with ethernet.
I dunno.
Let us know what you find!
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Some guesses:
- Power cycling can never hurt
- Peplink routers can report on Ethernet transmission errors using a hidden URL. Not sure if this is supposed to be public or not but if there is a communication issue between the router and the modem, it might show up here.
- modems have web UIs. Check it for errors and signal levels
- In case electricity is the issue, plug both devices into a line interactive surge protector
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Thanks Michael! I appreciate your weighing in on this. Here’s a little more info regarding your suggestions:
We use a great component (Wattbox) – it’s job primarily is to monitor the internet connection, if it’s down – it performs an automatic reboot to refresh the devices plugged into it. (Commonly the ISP & Router/Balance), So it monitors &
self-heals – saves late night calls & truck rolls. Essentially we have 2 devices monitoring Internet from the ISP = The Balance 305 & The Wattbox.
You see the log I posted – imagine if the reboot wasn’t automated ? That’s why the reconnects happen relatively quick.
Additionally, the modem is bridged to the Balance 305, all the heavy lifting is being done by the Balance.
I’m cross eyed on this & use these tools to help when the ISP blames the LAN, when it’s the WAN side.
Thoughts??
Hello @Steve_Rosenthal,
Have you attempted swapping your bridging modem for another unit?
When we bridge in Australia, we discard the carrier supplied modems and use a Draytek Vigor 130. We use a special release of firmware developed for the Australian market place with the modem also. These have been very reliable and can tell us insights into the DSL connections (ADSL&VDSL) not available on the ISP supplied units. The extra details can be used as evidence when working with an ISP for diagnostics. We use to provide enterprise DSL routers from other major manufacturers, though found the Draytek Vigor 130 beat them all hands down including on cost, the only thing we miss is the rack mounting of the other major brands.
We never found a reason for losing networking at a site to be solved due to a fix done from power cycling the Peplink/Pepwave equipment, with one exception on this when we were testing a beta release. We would recommend removing your Balance 305 from the Wattbox. When the balance is power-cycled, you lose precious diagnostic details that could be captured to help you with the Peplink Support team in isolating your fault.
Happy to Help,
Marcus 
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+1 for the Drayek Vigor 130. Great modem and resilient as a tank.
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A key factor in debugging any problem is to simplify, so I would agree with mldowling to take the Wattbox out of the equation. FYI: Peplink routers can reboot on a schedule all by themselves.
Life is short, ditch the Arris box. Not elegant, but probably the least amount of time/effort on your part.
One easy thing to try is to turn off auto-negotiation of the Ethernet WAN port speed. This helped some people, not all, deal with Arris modems. Can’t hurt to tell the Peplink router the actual line speed too.
Still another easy guess: turn off everything, power on the Peplink, wait for it to boot, then power on the Arris modem. This is, of course, backwards, but I seem to recall it helped in some cases with Arris boxes. The details of Peplink and Arris were looooong and ugly, so again ignore what should be and get a Netgear cable modem.
Again, if you have the time, look at the gory techie details in both the modem and the Peplink router. Only upside is the education it provides
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