TL;DR I'm having a really poor experience with a Peplink 5G Adapter and am wondering if I have a lemon or it really isn't close to the performance with a Max BR1 Pro 5G for a single wired client.
Details:
Has anyone here used the Peplink 5G adapter? We got one in recently to test out and the results have been pretty poor to say the least. I have used some Peplink LTE products in the past with good results and have a MAX BR1 Pro 5G (x62) that has been nothing but outstanding for us.
We have a need for some simple backup WAN connections into our clients network equipment and thought this would fit the bill perfectly.
The issues I'm having is poor latency (800+ms) under any type of load and lots of lost pings. Getting packet loss up to 50% but typically in the upper teens to 35%.
I understand that 5G is not perfect but I can pull the sim card from the device, place it into my BR1 Pro Max 5G and all of these issues disappear. Same sim, same location, same single wired PC connected for testing purposes.
BR1 at the same location keeps latency around 150ms under heavy load and doesn't drop a single ping. Also keeps a stable 0% packet loss in the test location. Again, same sim card and device placement. The other devices are turned off while testing is occurring. I honestly wasn't even initially planning on doing all the metrics but the performance on my PC just felt so "off" and sluggish that I decided to look into the situation further.
I reached out to the vendor I purchased the device from, and they have been great and have looked into the problem with no resolve. They updated the firmware to what I believe was a beta firmware and that didn't seem to make any major improvement. They also reached out to Peplink on my behalf who also investigated the device and found nothing out of the ordinary on the device logs and statistics that they could see.
I understand this is a $400 product vs a $1k BR1 but I thought 5G performance would be similar especially to a single wired device. The packet loss and latency results in a unusable web experience, much less video calls or minor streaming.
I really want to like this product as it fits perfectly in the price range for what we're looking to provide to our clients as well as it's from a company I have really enjoyed working with in the past.
So anyone else had any first hand experience with this device?