The documentation states that Peplink has 4 carriers in the US for the SpeedFusion Connect 5G/LTE service. They are AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and US Cellular. My question is, how does Peplink select the carrier? Specifically, if there is a situation in which all 4 carriers can provide service at a particular location, but one of them is superior in terms of performance (latency/jitter/throughput), can we make sure the superior carrier is chosen or is that completely outside of our control and we may actually end up with the worst of the 4?
Thanks,
Ricardo
Carrier choice is driven by the SIM initially.
I’m sure someone else will verify this but I’m pretty sure it’s steered by a PLMN list. So T-Mobile will usually connect first (if available) as its first in the list.
Then from a Peplink perspective you can manually select which operator you want to use, test performance, then rinse and repeat until you find the best operator.
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Thanks Martin for confirming. Being able to manually select all 4 carriers and choose the best one for each site is a big plus.
I went ahead and bought the SpeedFusion Connect plan for one of the units in our lab so I could test. It activated and I was able to make use of the service within minutes which was great. Unfortunately, the setting to select the carrier of choice does not seem to do anything. It always sticks to T-Mobile even though I know for a fact it is the weakest when compared to Verizon and AT&T in the exact same spot. I have other units with physical Verizon and AT&T SIMs so I know for sure.
See for example the screenshots when I set it for Verizon.
It is interesting that when I make the change and hit Save, the cellular modem does reset and takes about 2 minutes to come back on-line, but it always comes back as T-Mobile.
I had high hopes for this service, but if we do not have the flexibility to pick the best performing carrier and just leave Peplink to always select T-Mobile, then it is not for us.
Thanks,
Ricardo
Further digging into the settings, I saw that you have a deeper setting at the SIM level. Here I was able to manually select the carrier for the SpeedFusion services and can confirm I successfully cycled through service with T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon. Makes me wonder what the Network Mode is for then as it did not seem to do anything.
I am backing to thinking this service is pretty cool.
