For background, I am a software engineer and I live aboard my 35ft sailboat full time. My work contracts are always remote (obviously), the flip side of which is that clients have zero tolerance for poor internet service (understandably). I have a gen3 Starlink dishy wired to my new B1 5G, and I moved over the Verizon physical sim that was in my Nighthawk and an AT&T physical sim I have to hot-swap in as needed (I’m mostly sailing the Eastern US so Verizon and AT&T are the best cross-spread for backup coverage). The AT&T sim works fine, the Verizon, not surprisingly, finds signal but cannot get an IP address. So I spent 3 hours on the phone with Verizon support yesterday trying to get them to update the IMEI, but no luck. I was about to start back into that battle again today.
But then I did a little homework and found the Peplink paid eSIM plans option - is this as easy as it sounds? If I understand correctly, I pay Peplink way less than I am currently paying each of 2 carriers (after weeks of troubleshooting, Verizon would only work on the nighthawk with a $100-a-month post-paid plan of which I used exactly 0MB of data last month) and the eSIM handles traffic spread across all 3 networks (Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T) under the hood? And I can use that spread for bonding? The Starlink has been generally reliable throughout the Chesapeake with only little “hiccups” where I’d want the 5G to fill in.
A couple of things come to mind I may need to work around. I currently have the Starlink shut down on a schedule at night to conserve power (I have 800w of solar and 600AH of battery so it’s not infinite), I’ll need to figure out a way to schedule the eSIM not to fall over and burn through bandwidth while I’m asleep. I’ll also need to blacklist things like dockerhub on the esim so I don’t accidentally yank down TB of containers when the Starlink is out. But other than that… the Peplink eSIM seems like a way better solution, right? What am I not thinking of?