The aircard seems to be working fine with pfSense despite being, well, a little fussy: it’s fussy enough that I’ve got a Proxicast PocketPort 2 on order. This little jewel is powered by Micro-USB and converts a USB aircard to 10/100 Ethernet. It supports the Verizon equivalent of the USB800, so I should be good to go once it arrives. There’s two good things about this: 1) it lets me replicate the AF23 dock for the old Huawei card, and 2) it means if I wanted to put the hAP ac Lite back in service, which has crossed my mind a couple of times, I would be able to use the 24V to 5V Micro-USB passive PoE splitter that was used with the Nighthawk M1 at AWA last year with good results after adding a Micro-USB to USB-C adapter. The only gotcha is it limited us to 100 Mb. Not a huge issue as I have rarely seen over 100 Mb from the USB800.
It all comes down to simplicity: the PocketPort 2 is tiny so it won’t take up much room in the case and lets me not have to contend with failover connection stupidity.
The plan is as follows: stick to pfSense and leverage the PocketPort 2 for a single WAN port that is not USB-based. Once it shows up I’ll first verify the aircard works with it then start planning to reconfigure the Pelican case once again. This will be, what, the third time this year? I’m not sure why but once I switched wireless ISPs things have been slightly unstable on that front. Had I stuck to T-Mobile, though, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been happy since my office is a black hole for them. Such is life: at least I’ll be able to bundle fiber in with my wireless plan on AT&T. That’s one +1 for them!