Unavailability threshold for ATT/TMobile?

Connectivity
1

I have a Boron 404X located in an area with very poor ATT+TMobile service. Verizon is the dominant provider in this area. I experience cloud outages on a daily/multiple times per week basis. Yesterday this device was offline for ~16h before reconnecting.

I’ve installed a cell booster at the site with it’s Yagi uplink antenna directed towards an ATT tower; this has had no effect on reducing link downtime.

The intermittency of this device has made it nearly unusable for my purposes, and I would thus classify it “unavailable”.

Particle docs state, “Existing EtherSIM devices in the field and new ones to be shipped will automatically connect to the Verizon network when other networks are unavailable.”

  1. What constitutes “unavailable” in the eyes of Particle/the upstream EtherSIM provider?
  2. Is Verizon only available to Enterprise account holders?
  3. If I can’t assign a Vz network preference via user code, is this something I can request of Particle/your EtherSIM provider?
  4. Should I install my own Vz SIM, is the hardware SIM guaranteed to have preference over eSIM, and is there appropriate fallback behavior to the eSIM?

Thank you.

2

Yes, Verizon is only available if you are on an enterprise contract (Verizon access costs more).
If you use a Verizon native SIM the device will work briefly, and then get banned by Verizon as they don’t allow non-registered devices. Our SIMs are exempt from the restrictions. The IMEI is banned, so the device will then never be able to connect to Verizon. There is no fallback that’s automatic if you use an external SIM.

A device will attempt to switch carriers after 3-5 minutes, so it’s important to give it the time. At around 10mins the modem is power cycled which is usually the kick it needs in some adverse situations.
Even on Enterprise you cannot manually force a carrier, but on certain plans we can steer a SIM from the backend.

If you use a YAGI antenna however, you skew the process and give it only one tower to work with, so it’s not really possible to switch carriers if that tower does not have T-Mobile radios on it for example.

But

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Thanks for the quick reply and additional info. I’ve reached out to the sales channels to discuss my options.