By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard of T-Mobile’s continued expansion of band 71 frequency across the United States. It seems as if the company’s coverage map grows more and more pink every day.
If you need a refresher, band 71 is a low-frequency, 600 MHz band T-Mobile purchased in 2017. This frequency range travels twice as far and works four times better in buildings than conventional LTE bands. Band 71 also provides better coverage in remote areas and in homes. The frequency band is expected to become more widely available with the recent merger of T-Mobile and Sprint.
The availability of band 71 in and of itself is a positive, but it’s even more important given our new work-from-home reality. The increase in people working from home has put a strain on bandwidth availability in our communities, especially in rural areas. Access to a strong and reliable internet connection away from the office can be extremely slow, not to mention expensive, for those who only have access to LTE or satellite connectivity. Workers who are unable to maintain a consistent internet connection from home can be faced with a difficult—and potentially dangerous—choice: stay home where it’s safe and struggle to work, or go into the office and risk exposure to the novel coronavirus. We know none of our partners want their customers to be in that position!
At FrontierUS, we make sure our partners have access to the best hardware options for helping end-users to work efficiently and safely. The simple and effective solution is a Peplink device with failover technology. Failover is the SD-WAN term for automated switching from a primary WAN source—cable, DSL, fiber, satellite or cellular—to a secondary or backup WAN. We compiled a more in-depth explanation for those who are interested.
“Right now, I’m working from home too,” our partner development manager, Jon Grote, shared. “I live in a rural area with a spotty internet connection, so I have a Pepwave MAX Transit Mini at my house that can failover from one WAN source to a more reliable one. My connection is stable, and I can continue to serve our partners from home.” The MAX Transit Mini was the first Peplink device to access band 71, and now all of Peplink’s gigabit LTE routers and category 18 routers accommodate that frequency.
LTE backup, or failover, is becoming the norm for users. The ability to access coverage from multiple carriers through a single Peplink device is increasingly important. A break in connectivity can mean downtime for a company, loss of communication with remote workers and reduced productivity. When users have access to band 71, the likelihood of losing connectivity goes down considerably.
Regardless of which carrier you offer, or your customer prefers, consider providing access to T-Mobile as a reliable backup. “It doesn’t hurt to have a backup to enhance your end-user’s experience,” Grote explained. “Your end-user really doesn’t care which carrier their internet connectivity is coming from. What they care about is unbreakable connectivity anytime, anywhere.”
This is where Peplink has your end-users’ needs at heart. If an organization’s main in-house router is Peplink, offering those working from home something like the MAX Transit Mini makes setting up a VPN much easier and cleaner. It’s a small but mighty piece of hardware that gets the job done with failover to multiple carriers. If you need a more robust router that allows you to use multiple WAN connections simultaneously, take a look at any of Peplink’s Multi-Cellular MAX routers.
Peplink’s products are available to FrontierUS Channel Partners.
