I currently have the following setup:
Primary WAN: Starlink
Secondary WAN: Fibre PPoE, via a VDSL modem
Router: Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Machine Pro SE (it has dual WAN support so both WAN connections run through it)
Plus a bunch of Unifi networking equipment
My wife and I both work from home and spend a lot of time on Teams/Zoom calls.
It’s generally fine, although Starlink’s occasional outages are a bit of a pain. The UDMP has a failover function, but it doesn’t seem to work quickly enough so we occasionally get small interruptions in our calls.
I keep seeing Peplink routers (combined with SpeedFusion) as a solution to this, but the product range is a bit overwhelming! So a couple of questions:
- What’s the most appropriate Peplink device for me?
- I assume the simplest approach would be to replace the UDMP with the Peplink device; is there an option to have both, or will that just overcomplicate matters?
Thanks in advance, and apologies for the newbie questions!
Glenn.
Hello, Glenn.
I am not an expert, so I’ll let those who are better qualified provide the definitive answer to your first question about which model would be best in your situation. That being said, it seems the 20X, with its 900Mb/s throughput, is adequate for a Starlink/DSL dual WAN setup. There is only one WAN Ethernet port, but because you’re using a DSL connection, you can install the VDSL flex module. This effectively makes your 20X a dual WAN router.
https://estore.peplink.com/products/exm-mini-1vdsl
Yes, you can use the Peplink router in front of your UDMP. The feature you are describing is named ‘Drop-in Mode.‘ Peplink will seamlessly and transparently handle the connections without the need to make any configuration changes to your existing hardware.
Read about it here:
https://forum.peplink.com/t/configuring-drop-in-mode
Video:
Balance 20X is a reasonable choice here. Moderate cost for the hardware, some low ongoing costs in terms of PrimeCare subscription to consider too though, other options are a bit thin on the ground in terms of something that fits that kind of role / price point at the moment as in the 20X should be sub $500 USD, anything else is likely pushing over $1k USD starting price.
My frank opinion is don’t bother with the VDSL module, they are rather expensive for what they are, if your DSL line delivers less than 100Mbps just use a USB-Ethernet adapter instead, or in the near future you can also look into the virtual WAN licence for the 20X which lets you repurpose a LAN port as a WAN port.
SpeedFusion is the right thing to be looking at if you want to smooth over the gaps in the Starlink with some cellular connectivity and DSL to fill in, the CAT-4 modem in the 20X is a bit lacklustre but for backup it is probably fine here.
Whilst the 20X can route/NAT at around 900Mbps the SF Capacity on the 20X tops out at a rated 100Mbps (it will do a bit more in reality), so will bottleneck your Starlink a bit if you send all traffic via SF, but with a bit of outbound policy to send only necessary traffic vis SF you be OK for your intended use case.
As for replacing the UDMP vs putting the 20X in front of it, if it were me I’d be firing that UDMP out of a cannon into the sun but that’s for more reasons than my growing distain for everything related to Ubnt as a company and their products 
Drop-in mode would require less work on the UDMP side, but I’d probably not bother with it here, bit more complexity where it is not really needed as I can’t imagine either replacing the UDMP with the 20X or modifying the UDMP config is a bit issue here, drop-in is intended for situations in my eyes where those choices would not be an option.
You can disable NAT on the UDMP, you can then route traffic from it to your 20X and then onwards from there to avoid adding more layers of NAT to your network. There are a couple of posts on the forums with people doing just that but requires you do some work on the UDMP side to disable NAT on it as it’s not a standard way of operating the UDMP.
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Further to this the other bit to consider if you want to make use of SpeedFusion is whether you use SpeedFusion Cloud, or host your own FusionHub.
SpeedFusion Cloud (SFC) is a service offered by Peplink. You pre-pay for data transfer, they host and manage / maintain the hub end of things and configuration is pretty straightforward. Advantages to you, easy to setup and not a lot to maintain or worry about. One main disadvantage of SFC at the moment though is if you maybe want to do inbound connectivity / port forwarding via the SF tunnel though SFC is not for you as that feature is currently not supported.
FusionHub (FH) hosted in a cheap cloud provider such as Vultr or DigitalOcean is the other easy option. Licence for a FusionHub SOLO is free - it allows one peer device, in this instance that would be the 20X in your house. Configuration is pretty easy, there are many guides on the forum on how to do this. Ongoing costs are ~$5-10USD a month depending on where you host it for 1-2Tb a month of data transfer. Advantages are you get a bit more control, you can also use the public IP of the FH as point for incoming connections into your network and port forward to devices behind the 20X via the hub. Disadvantage is perhaps there is a bit more for you to manage and maintain here, but in all honesty it’s not a lot of work.
