Speed Issues - Pepwave MAX Transit Wan

Product Discussion Pepwave MAX
#1

Hello,

I am new to the device that I recently purchased for my RV travels (Pepwave Max Transit) but am in IT support by trade and quite frustrated with the speeds available on my Pepwave Duo.

I have connected to both a 2.4 and 5ghz version of a very strong connection at a friend’s house within a decent range of their router/AP and am capping speeds at 20mb down on an 200+ connection. Ii’ve exhausted all settings and troubleshooting I can think of and have made very minimal changes on the device since setup. Help!

Device Name MAX-TST-B191
Model Pepwave MAX Transit
Product Code MAX-TST-DUO-LTEA-W-T-PRM
Hardware Revision 2
Firmware 8.1.0 build 4943
PepVPN Version 8.0.0
#2

Same here. My house has 485 down when inside. Outside my rv and house but hooked to rv max transit (in my rv parked in front) I get less than 20 down although it has my house ssid as primary. If I change while in same physical location to house said, I get 185 down.

#3

I don’t necessarily recommend what I did to solve the problem, but being in IT for as long as I’ve been, I know using the same radio as a client-bridge and as an AP tends to result in relatively poor performance so I bought an AP One - AX for my client coverage and only use the rooftop for bridging unless I’m out somewhere with cellular only and I want the better wifi outside. Super easy to toggle the AP on and off on the built-in while not bothering the AP One.

3 Likes
#4

This is the correct answer. Also, turn Speedfusion and any other tunnel off whether directing traffic to it or not - the CPU on the MTD is not very powerful.

#5

I don’t know I really understand the answers here. So use an entirely different device for WiFi connections and disregard roof antenna?

Leaving the other 7 connections hooked to peplink but effectively only using the cellular?

#6

@drewp1311: What @joelbean & @codatory are suggesting is to use one AP for wi-fi-as-WAN and one for client connections. Their recommendations are completely consistent with the results of our experiments – solves the issues associated with having one radio do WAN connections and serving clients at the same time.

1 Like
#7

Thanks Rick.
Or, to put it another way, turn the AP off on the Dashboard - the paddle antennas won’t be needed. Then use an external AP that is hardwired your LAN port for all client connections.

I run 5 Ubiquiti Nano APs off a 24 port POE switch that’s connected to the Max Transit Duo LAN port. I manage 30 clients using switches and external APs.

Any hardwired AP will allow you to connect to another wifi source using the WIFI as WAN feature of your Max - just don’t use the built in AP and antennas on the MAX. This will offload the need for the MAX radio and CPU, from managing client connections and they will only manage your WAN connections. The router will still list all of the clients. It just won’t use the single radio and CPU to keep them connected.

1 Like
#8

I’m using a Max Transit DUO as well. The 2.4 AP should be more than capable of 100Mbps, but I found that it was delivering much much less. After simply switching from 2.4 to 5G AP I saw my speeds quadruple without making any other changes. I found this when doing speeds test on various cell carrier networks; my test were not valid.

On 5G AP I was able to capture my fastest speed test a couple days ago. 125Mbps down.

I assumed that the issue was that the 2.4 spectrum was noisy in my test area, but after reading this thread I’m wondering if there might be something else going on.

1 Like
#9

Adding another device as an AP/Router seems to have helped with speed issues.

Wifi via Orbi (200-300mb) – over wifi to – Pepwave Max - LAN to Nighthawk router - broadcast over 2.4/5ghz gets 50mb -100mb down

1 Like
#10

Doesn’t that seem to be a very expensive add on???

#11

It sure feels that way, but so far not seen another solution unfortunately.

1 Like
#12

Hopefully Pepwave engineers watching this as this just doesn’t make sense.

#13

Yeah; I sort of expect a ~60% drop when sharing the radio but it seems there are other limitations at play - possibly CPU or memory bandwidth or similar. Of course, you can use any old cheap AP if you don’t want to do VLANs and whatnot, or you can use one band on the MAX Transit for your upstream connection and another for your clients.

I’ve also just been surprised with the generally underwhelming performance of the MTD in all other areas, so I’ve sort of given up on digging into it or fighting too much.