That’s interesting and surprised me a bit. I would assume that it’s activated in most cases. I did have to push back a little bit to get my cellular connection activated and working though.
My install took place over two days, but the electricians pushed to finish everything on the AC side on the first day. They started around 7AM and finally finished at like 5:30PM or 6PM. It’s was a very long day for the electricians, but apparently they didn’t plan to come back on the next day. When the electrician who installed the gateway left he mentioned to the foreman that as he was installing cables he accidentally nicked one of the wires for one of the antennas in the gateway, but he wasn’t sure if he damaged it. He said that he was leaving a spare antenna just in case there was a problem.
During the second day they finished mounting the solar panels and ran all of the DC wires, then the foreman went to commission the system. We got it connected to ethernet and WiFi and he mentioned that he was struggling to get the cellular connection working. He said that it just wasn’t showing any signal at all and he thought that was kind of odd because he’s never seen that before. He said that he would just leave it with ethernet and WiFi. I was a bit reluctant to just leave it like that, especially since at one point after hurricane Irma my home internet connection was out for 3 days, but he said that he just couldn’t couldn’t get a signal at all. I was about to just let it go when I remembered what the electrician had said about the antenna wire and I reminded him of that.
We went back to check the antenna wires in the gateway and discovered that one had been cut nearly all the way though. He replaced that antenna with the spare that the electrician had left and it was then able to get a cellular signal and he was able to activate it without problems.
It certainly sounded like he normally activated the cellular connection on all of the systems that he commissions and he said that this was the first one that he was unable to activate it on.