So our setup is the following:
our company works with customers at sea who manage windmillparks. In these windmillparks we offer 4G connection over a wide area that’s been setup through a softcore. This means we have our own APN at sea.
The problem here is that the behaviour of these pepwaves (Pepwave MAX BR1 ENT) at sea is very weird. Let me give an example:
so the Pepwave MAX BR1 ENT has 2 sim slots. 1 contains a known provider and the other one contains a SIM card with our offshore APN. our sim card only works 20kilometres in sea, where our coverage for the network begins. The other SIM works everywhere else when the boat is at land. Roaming is also enabled. The coverage of this “land” SIM loses its connection when the boat is a few kilometres at sea. Now here is where the strange behaviour finds place.
Sometimes the sea SIM (we also call it offshore sim) connects perfectly to the network, and there is no problem. Other times (most of the times) the pepwave just can’t seem to find the network while it is in full coverage (catphones on the boat with sim cards too have full connection at that time). When we check the logs of the router all we see is connection fails to the offshore SIM, it’s like it doesn’t even see the network. That way it always tries to connect to the onshore sim (the land sim) but very far at sea this connection is very poor or even unreachable.
What we already have tried:
rebooting the router (multiple times) without success
Change preferred sim with different idle timeouts. When we have prefered sim offshore, the sim never wants to failover to the land sim whenever the boat reaches the dock. When we have preferred sim onshore, the sim keeps trying to connect to the land even when 20km at sea, without seeing the full coverage of the offshore sim. Checking the logs of the pepwave once the router is up again, the only thing we see as logs is the following: Cellular cannot connect, switching to SIM B.
disable 3G and setup a threshold for the onshore SIM so at a certain level of connection it has to failover to the offshore sim. Because when the threshold is too low, the signal will be treated as down and that way it should switchover to offshore sim… but no. all it does is say wan threshold not reached and does not failover in any way.
try using other SIM cards for onshore, but this gave the same negative result offshore
Anyone any ideas why this is happening? We know for sure the 4G network at sea is correctly configured because the phones can connect to it and the pepwaves have connected to it also but very very irregularly.
Any tips or help or config changes I can try would be greatly appreciated
This does seem to be odd behavior. Can I check, do you have a Health-Check enabled ? Whilst everyone has they preferred check, I like the DNS lookup :-
I would try setting the Offshore SIM as the preferred SIM, as this only has one network it can connect to, whereas the Onshore SIM has data roaming enabled, so it is likely to keep searching for networks. If you know the Country codes that the Onshore SIM is likely to connect to, this may also help - it is possible this SIM is trying to connect to the offshore network and failing the authentication, if you leave it as “All Countries”:-
You may want to adjust the Idle Timeout to something more suitable for your needs.
Here is a link to another Forum Post with a bit more information about the Country Codes and a link at the bottom to find the codes, etc > Here <
These are the cellular settings. As you can see we have our own apn so we do not need roaming on that (tested before doesn’t make any difference). We also enabled specific band selection. As for selecting the offshore sim as preferred we have tried this in the past and this brought the problem that we had no connection anymore onshore because the failover the other way wasn’t working either. (they need internet connection too at the dock. But important point here: when the onshore sim was preferred we did have good connection onshore. The routers are integrated in a setup with a computer which connects to a onboarding registration website. Here the staff can use the RFID scanner also attached to the computer to scan their on/off boarding of the staff)
as for the smartcheck, i have never really tried the DNS lookup, this might be something I can try out. I never really understood when this healtcheck is done, because I only saw it once or twice in the logs, as it is barely executed.
This really is odd - I would try changing the onshore SIM from “All Countries” though to just those the device is likely to use. I wonder if that SIM is detecting the offshore network as an “Allowed Country” but then fails the authentication process - what this doesn’t explain is why it then doesn’t fail-over, unless because it detects the network it keeps trying.
I’m really curious, did any of the above help? If not, would you mind opening a support ticket > Here < so that I can take a closer look?
When you raise the support ticket it would be great if the BR1 could be away from any on-shore network and only in range of the off-shore network. Then, if possible, using a phone connected to the off-shore network, you could create a WiFi Hotspot and with WiFi WAN on the BR1 accessing the hotspot we can help to troubleshoot.
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to test this out at sea yet. Because we config these cases at the office and then send them out to 3rd party company who goes at sea with it. I am not allowed to go on the sea myself so this is kind of a bottleneck for troubleshooting. If I change something from the remote web admin that risks losing the connection of the router and when I do lose that connection due to some saved new settings, I can’t access the router again remotely until it is back onshore…
Today I must finish a case that will depart at sea this week. I have configured it with the DNS health check settings and the other settings you passed me through. I’ll keep you updated what the behaviour was of this.
We might have found the problem causing this. As our 4G expert was looking into the logfiles of the softcore (the machine where our own apn runs on) and we looked at the behaviour of the IMSI of the offshore simcard. What we noticed was that it was constantly trying to negotiate over ipv6 which is not supported on the softcore. We should be able to disable ipv6 on the pepwave. Is this by any case possible?
I think we need to take a closer look at this - please could you raise a support ticket and I’ll investigate further with the engineering team > Here <
Currently We are using the latest Firmware version 7.1.0 build 3433. If there was an option to specifically disable ipv6 on cellular this would probably solve our issue
