A little over a year ago, we received a Peplink Pepwave Surf SOHO Mk3 Router for review. The original review and setup guide is found here. As an update to that review, this post is all about how it has fared, what we’ve had to do with it, and in general the opinions made after using it for slightly over a year.
A few minor issues
A couple of months ago, we started having issues with the Surf SOHO. The wifi would go down, it was still showing as an available network on our devices, but no traffic was going through it. We’d reboot it and then it would be fine. After some struggling to find the solution, I determined that it was probably just getting too hot in the cabinet we had it in. Since I would go back, open the cabinet, reset the power, and then wait for everything to reconnect, it seemed that heat was the issue. I was never able to determine where the threshold was for failure or how hot it was getting in the cabinet, but that seems to be the problem.
I cannot fault Peplink for this though as electronics in general need to be kept cool. We now keep the cabinet propped open and that seems to help.
The second issue is that it sometimes loses the connection to the modem, which is connected by USB. I cannot determine if it is the modem or the router though, but rebooting the modem usually fixes the issue. That alone means it is probably the modem and not the router.
I did have to reset it awhile ago as I managed to screw up the settings, which then caused it to lose all information. I knew that would happen though, but it also lost the traffic data, so I can’t see it we are using more or less data than we used to be. I’ve got it back up and running and everything seems to fine now.
We also had it completely lose all its history of traffic at one point for no reason. The wifi was fine, all the settings were fine, but for some reason it lost the historical data on its own.
The Good News
Other than those minor issues, most of which are not the fault of the router, it has worked well. We have updated the firmware a couple of times without issue, though I’m not sure what changed with the firmware since I didn’t see any change in the admin settings nor functionality. The wifi has worked well and we’ve had no failures that required a replacement. The wifi does cover the entire inside of our 33 foot long RV, even though it is sitting in the back area.
The wifi doesn’t work very well outside the RV, but since it has aluminum siding, I assume it is more of an issue with the metal skin than the router itself.
We also have several devices connected with ethernet through a network switch and they have maintained decent enough speed to stream video from our Plex server to either of our TVs (one ethernet, one wifi).
Reliability has been stellar, aside from the overheating issue which is my fault anyway. We’ve never needed to send it back for warranty repair and the only time it had to be reset to factory was after I screwed it up myself. It is not exactly plug-and-play, but it is not difficult to setup either.
Recommended for small homes or RVs with either a modem that can be connected with ethernet or some, select USB hotposts.
