Comcast provided Cradlepoint is a performance bottleneck

Hello and Happy Tuesday, @portlander33 Thank you for reaching out to Comcast Business Support community, here.

Connection Pro kicks in with 4G LTE connectivity if you lose power or service, as a backup Internet connection. It helps keep your Internet up and running, but only as a backup. It is not designed to match your In office Internet Speed.

4G offers maximum real-world download speeds up to around 100Mbps.

I hope this helps.

"I hope this helps."

It does not.  You misunderstood the original post.  Connection Pro (Cradlepoint) limits the speed to about 100Mbps, even when it is not using the cellular network, but is using the cable modem for Internet connection.  My Comcast cable modem is actively providing 600Mbps service to us.  But Connection Pro can only use 1/6th of it.

If I disconnect the cable modem, Connection Pro kicks into cellular mode.  In this mode, I only get about 2Mbps.  This is fine.  I have no issue with the backup cellular service being super slow.  I have an issue with being limited to 100Mbps business service at all times, when I paying for 600Mbps.

Please see the link to Cradlepoint's site I provided in the original post.  It clearly describes the problem I am seeing.  I would look into this myself a little more, but I cannot.  Comcast locks the configuration for the Cradlepoint device and customers cannot change or even view any settings.

I know that this is old but I needed to chime in. 

I am an IT consultant and have a bunch of clients that have the Cradlepoints as part of their bundle. I have one as well but have just never had the time to get this setup correctly. The other day Comcast went down in the area for about 4 to 5 hours and the kids could not do their homework. No big deal but I started thinking about this Cradlepoint that I have that is not doing anything. Why don't I look at this thing and see what it can do for me?

Looking at my bill, I am paying for the Connection Pro service as part of my bundle and paying for the Cradlepoint as part of my equipment fee (says so right on the bill, part of the $29.95)

Now here is what I understand from these posts and from working with Cradlepoint on other projects non Comcast. For the Cradlepoint to work, you have to connect your ISP to the WAN port of the Cradlepoint and then your network to one of the LAN ports on the cradlepoint. If Comcast goes out, Cradlepoint picks up cellular and you are good to go until Comcast is restored. Simple enough I thought.

I read through Comcasts Connection Pro overview which has information that no one at Comcast tells you about. The Overview can be found at this link,

https://business.comcast.com/support/article/internet/connection-pro-overview

Here is my experience with this -

I have a special situation being an IT guy. I have a Ubiquiti Dream Machine with dual WAN. I also have a block of static IP's. You cannot use static IP's with the Cradlepoint, you have to use the dynamic IP's that are assigned by the Cradlepoint. Long story there but I decided to use my failover WAN 2 on my Ubiquiti. Have not been able to get it to work because I cannot get the Cradlepoint to failover to Cellular. That will be a call to Comcast. 

I found a major issue with all of this and I believe this is stated in previous posts. I connected the Cradlepoint directly to the Comcast modem via the wan port and then my laptop to one of the lan ports on the cradlepoint. Everything worked fine, I had internet via the Comcast modem through the Cradlepoint. I checked my laptop and I pickup a 192.168.165.x IP and I can communicate with the internet. I disconnect the coax on my Comcast modem to simulate an outage but the Cradlepoint will not kick over to cellular. I guess again a call to Comcast.

I connect everything back up and have internet again and decided to run a speedtest. I have 500Meg down here. I can get no more than 154Meg. Cradlepoint is a bottleneck. 

Here is the problem. 

According to the Comcast overview you may need to make changes to your network to utilize the cradlepoint in the event of an outage. Most if not all of my clients are not able to make those changes themselves. 

If you connect this equipment the correct way so that cradlepoint can sense the internet went down, you will never have your full speeds. 

We are all paying for this service and the equipment! Why? 

Comcast does not tell you what the Cradlepoint will and will not do. I don't think they really even know. They do not tell you that your 500Meg line will now be 150Meg when you have the equipment setup correctly. They do not tell you that if you have static IP's the Cradlepoint is useless.

Yet we are all paying and have been paying for this service and equipment that is useless and misrepresented.

How is there not a class action lawsuit about this?

For what its worth, I checked ours and our 600/35 service is speed testing at 694K/40K. Disclaimer is that there are not many users on the system right now. 

I'm still frustrated with Connection Pro for the following reasons:

Cradelpoint was installed after we had a problem with our system but nobody remembers signing up for it.

The switchover configuration was never tested.

The Mac address listed on the Cradelpoint as shown by the account dashboard is invalid. 

The Cradelpoint router when installed created a different subnet for all the devices connected to it requiring everything to be reset

The ability to reserve an IP for one of our servers for FTP data logging was lost when the devices were connected to it

There seems no way to access the Cradelpoint device from the LAN or WAN

The Cradelpoint router is in series with the main router so it is another point of catastrophic failure. 

We are paying $29 a month for nothing.