IR809 and IR829 4G connections and antenna

[Martin2m2]

Dear community,

I'm puzzled about the dual SIM + dual antennas on the IR809 and dual SIM + four antennas on the IR829.

What is the difference between the Cellular MAIN 0 and AUX 0 antenna connections of the 809? Is one for SIM 0 and the other for SIM 1? Or are both for SIM 0 and SIM 1, but is it active/standby? So only if SIM 0 fails than SIM 1 becomes active? And why the two antenna's?

It is even more complicated with the 829 with Cellular MAIN 0 + AUX 0 and MAIN 1 + AUX 1 antenna connections. What is the logic behind the dual SIM and four antenna connections?

My customer also requests that the router should support 2x Cellular PDP. I can't find anything on PDP in the IR documentation. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Martin

[ernelson · Accepted solution]

Hi Martin -

So the 809 and 829 are owned by IOT, but I can answer the question because it’s the same for all cellular interfaces for Cisco.

With our Cellular interfaces , each one has one radio, but support 2 SIM’s and 2 antenna ( main 0 /aux1).

The reason for two antennas is that we receive on two antenna, but we transmit over the main 0 antenna. With two antenna we are able to see our overall RSSI levels get to be about 3-5 –dBi better, so each radio performs better with two antennas.

The reason they support dual SIM is in the case of fail over, you can have SIMs from 2 different providers and in the event of a network failure by one mobility provider link-recovery will kick in and fail over to the other sim, which will attach to a new/different network for services.

We have customers that have written EEM scripts to switch between mobility networks based on SLA’s or data usage, or whatever business reason they have to switch.

The new 829 supports dual Radio, so 2 antenna for each radio.

-Eric

[kkong]

In IR829, is Controller Cellular 0 map to SIM0 / Antenna main 0 / Antenna Aux 0, and Controller Cellular 1 map to SIM 1/Antenna 1 and Aux 1? If so, does that mean interface Cellular 0/0 map to Antenna 0, and Interface Cellular 0/1 map to Cellular AUX 0? If so, do you need to enable both Interfaces Cellular 0/0 for Main Antenna and Interface Cellular 0/1 to receive traffic from Cellular Antenna AUX 0 (in your reply "we receive on two antenna")?