The Pepwave 5G adapter is $399, and it adds 5G cellular WAN to any router with a single ethernet cable. No new router, no swapping out your gateway. You plug it into a WAN port and your existing network gets a cellular connection.
I run one of these at my own house feeding a UniFi UCG Fiber, and this is the exact setup I do on every one of them. It takes about ten minutes, and there are two spots where doing things in the wrong order will cost you an afternoon.
What you get for $399
Around the back there are four SMA antenna connectors. The adapter ships with antennas, and they are fine if the device is sitting near a window. If you are mounting the adapter in a closet or a rack, you want an external antenna instead so the antenna can live somewhere high with a clear view and the adapter can stay inside. We sell cellular antennas for exactly this.
There is one 2.5 gig ethernet port and it takes PoE in. At my house the UCG Fiber has a PoE WAN port, so the adapter runs off a single cable with no power brick at all. If your gateway does not do PoE, use the included 12 volt 2 amp adapter, or feed it 12 or 24 volt DC directly.
The SIM options are the part people do not expect at this price. Two physical SIM slots, eSIM, remote SIM from an injector on your LAN, and Fusion SIM in the cloud if you are managing a fleet of Peplink gear. Peplink also throws a 1 GB eSIM into every unit, so you can set the thing up and get it into InControl 2 before your real SIM ever shows up. A GPS puck comes in the box too.
If you know the UniFi world, this is the same idea as the UniFi 5G Max with more features and no memory surcharge. I am doing a full comparison of the two in an upcoming video.
Step 1: Antennas first, then power
Attach your antennas, screw on the GPS puck, and install your SIM before you plug anything in. Powering up a cellular radio with no antenna attached can cook it. This is the one step where order actually matters.
Then run an ethernet cable from the adapter to a WAN port on your router. If that port does PoE, the adapter comes up as soon as you plug it in.
One tip from doing this at my own house: put it near a window on the first go. You can move it later, and the signal readings in Step 4 will tell you whether you should.
Step 2: Log in
The default IP is 192.168.50.1, and if you are on UniFi it is routable from your LAN right away. Give it a minute after power, then open that address in a browser. Default credentials are admin / admin, and it makes you set a strong password the moment you log in.
The dashboard shows a green Connected with cellular feeding into the adapter. Over in UniFi you will see a second WAN connection on the 192.168.50.0/24 network.
Step 3: Fix your SIM priority
If the carrier says Webbing USA, you are running on the included 1 GB Peplink eSIM, not your real SIM. Easy fix.
Go to Network > Cellular > SIM Priority. The Peplink eSIM sits at priority 1 out of the box and the SIM you installed in slot A is down at priority 2. Drag SIM A up to priority 1, drag the eSIM down to priority 3, then Save and Apply.
Give it a minute and the status goes back to green Connected on your own SIM. UniFi may keep showing Webbing USA for a little while after that, which is normal. It just takes UniFi a bit to catch up.
While you are in there, you can rename the connection under Cellular. I set mine to Crosstalk Mobile Unlimited so it is obvious in every screen after this.
Step 4: Read your signal before you commit to a location
This is the part most people skip, and it is the most useful screen on the device.
From the dashboard, click the Network tab, then Details on your cellular connection. You get live telemetry with three numbers that matter:
- SINR is signal to noise ratio. 20 or better is great, 13 to 20 is good, below that is mediocre to bad.
- RSRP is raw signal strength, or how loudly you are hearing the tower. It is measured in negative dBm and closer to zero is better. I am at -85 dBm here, which is excellent. -100 is okay. -110 or worse is a bad signal.
- RSRQ is signal quality, also in negative dB, also closer to zero is better. -10 or better is good, -15 is getting rough, -20 is really bad.
Together they tell you whether to move the adapter or its antenna. UniFi only exposes RSRP in the GUI, and we have seen plenty of sites where signal strength looks fine but RSRQ is bad, which is a congested tower rather than a weak one. You cannot see that difference on hardware that only reports one number.
With Peplink you can do something about it. Under SIMs > Band Selection, switch to Custom and exclude the band you are stuck on. In this case I am camped on 5G band n41, and if the quality on that band is poor I can block it and force the modem onto a different band and often a different tower.
That level of control is why we put Peplink at customer sites instead of prosumer gear. It is also why we tell people to buy their SIMs from us: you get actual network engineers who read these numbers for a living.
For the longer view, go to Status > WAN Quality and pick your connection. You get signal history over time, which is what you want open while you are physically moving the adapter or the antenna around to find a better spot.
Step 5: Add it to InControl 2 before you go any further
Do this now, not later, and definitely not after the next step.
In InControl 2, go to Devices > Add Devices. Pick the group or organization and site, add a tag if you want (we use the model number, so this one gets tagged Peplink 5G Adapter), and enter the serial number. You can type it, scan the barcode on the box, or upload a CSV for a batch.
Once the device is added it phones home, and from then on you can manage it remotely even from a factory default state. That includes after you turn on IP pass-through and lose local access to its web interface. That is why this step comes first.
Step 6: Turn on IP pass-through
Up to now the adapter is doing its own NAT, which means you are double NATed and any port you forward through your firewall will not work. What you want in UniFi is a publicly routable IPv4 address on that WAN port.
Go to Network, click your cellular connection, and flip the IP Passthrough toggle. You get a warning that reaching the router's web admin may need special setup on your browser device. You already handled that by adding it to InControl 2, so click OK.
Then choose which VLAN to pass through. On a simple network that is the untagged default VLAN 1. Save and Apply, wait a minute for it to reconnect, and check UniFi.
Now it shows T-Mobile USA on Internet 2 with a real routable IPv4 address on WAN 2. Ports forward, VPNs terminate, and nothing is sitting behind a second layer of NAT.
About static IPs
A cellular static IP is worth the $5 a month if your organization forwards any ports through the firewall. With IP pass-through plus a static IP, those forwards keep working on the cellular link the same as they do on your primary connection, with no CGNAT and no double NAT in the way. If you are using this adapter as failover for a site with anything inbound, get the static IP.
One last thing
While you are in the interface, check System > Firmware and click check for updates. As of this video I am on 2.0.3 with nothing pending.
That is the whole setup. If you get stuck on any of it, the engineers at Crosstalk Mobile do this every day and you can call or text us at 888-381-7750.
Browse our 5G cellular routers and adapters, or pair one with a Crosstalk Mobile unlimited 5G plan.
