I purchased a BR1 Pro 5G from my neighbor and I’m trying to get the InControl2 and device registration updated. Fun story… My neighbor never set up the device and doesn’t have anything showing on his portal to release to me.
On the security side of things, I can see wanting to prevent device registration transfers via the Peplink support team since the process would be a nice avenue for social engineering. However… When you are physically holding the hardware and have no options available for transferring registration, this is just stupid and has caused me to rethink using Peplink products in any capacity.
The previous owner and I have been working with the device re-seller org (Onboard Wireless) and had the customer information changed over to me in the Peplink DB, but still no dice with Peplink support. My neighbor went as far as opening a ticket requesting release of the hardware from his account. Am I just out of luck if my neighbor doesn’t see the device on his InControl2 or PepWave portal?!
I’ve worked in the telecom carrier space for over 20 years and this whole rodeo is pretty surprising.
I’m only a fellow customer, but it sounds strange that it is both registered with incontrol (because you can’t register it with your own incontrol login I assume because it’s somehow already added to an account) and not registered with his account (because it isn’t showing up.)
I assume tech support will work this out with the person who previously registered the device to their incontrol (not sure how this would occur unless something odd happened) with a little bit of time, unless it somehow got registered by some other person in the past?
I definitely understand your concern, but as a customer, I would worry about it being too easy to transfer the incontrol registration – e.g. if a device is in a location where other people have access to the physical device, I wouldn’t want someone to be able to transfer with only the serial number on the outside of the device. Or if you give a tech access to manage a device, I wouldn’t want him to be able to read the serial number there and transfer it to a different incontrol account without a good alert requirnig confirmation that it’s being transferred away. So if it’s registered with incontrol A, and the person selling it has incontrol B and wants to transfer it to you with incontrol C, I’d hope that if incontrol A can’t approve the transfer that some hefty verification takes place to make sure a device is never incorrectly transferred away from incontrol A.
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I agree just because you have physical access to it doesn’t mean you should be allowed to transfer it.
We also rent solutions combination of data plans and pepwaves and I wouldn’t want someone to transfer it just because they have access to the device and the s/n.
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Like you I think there should be a way to deal with this situation. Trouble is that it gets more and more complicated the deeper down the rabbit hole you go when it comes to ownership and usage rights.
I had a UK Peplink partner call me recently who had bought a device online (ebay) from the US and needed to track down the owner to get it released from IC2.
I trust this partner - known them for a long time, upstanding member of the Peplink community, Honest as the day is long. He showed me his proof of purchase from an official well known recycling / refurbishment company.
I rolled up my sleeves and found the distributor who sold it to the partner, found the partner who sold it to the customer, got the end customer contact details who then when called advised that it had been stolen from one of their sites.
Turns out it was actually lost by the logistics company and somehow it ended up getting recycled / refurbished.
So who owns it now? The end customer said they did. If the logistics company paid out on their insurance they could claim ownership. Maybe their lost and found sold it to the refurbishment company, then there is the UK partner who bought it legitimately too.
I think Peplink are so ‘brick wall’ like about IC2 registration in this way so they don’t get stuck in the middle of mess like this…
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