What's the best Mobile 5g Router? And why do we need Speed Fusion Cloud?

Product Discussion
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I’m looking for the best Router + antenna solution for my RV.
I do a lot of heavy uploads + live calls / streaming.
Looking for 5g compatible solution plus the best possible connectivity in places where even 4g is very weak.

Some routers come with two modems allowing to bond and hot failover between different SIM’s however I’m struggling to understand why do we need Speed Fusion Cloud?
If I have dual modem router - will I need to pay for Speed Fusion Cloud to be able to enjoy dual SIM bonding and hot failover?
Same question if it’s a single modem router and I would like to bond it with WIFI for extra speed / redundancy.

Thank You for recommendations and explanations!

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Welcome to the forum!

This is always going to be a little subjective, since the choice will be based on your location (which country are you in?) where you plan to travel most (metro or rural locations), and of course your budget.

That’s both ends of the spectrum. You’ll only really see the benefit of 5G in metro areas I would argue, and if 4G is weak then you’re most likley in a rural location.

If you have two modems use them actively at the same time and do not use bonding you are using load balancing. When load balancing, most applications will only be able to use a single modem (or WAN) at a time because their traffic is session based and a network session can only be load balanced on a single modem/WAN.

When bonding, the router uses a clever point to point VPN technology that bonds the modems together. This then lets a single session straddle two or more modems/WANs.

The benefit being that if you are doing a big file upload and a modem fails or a network gets busy and drops out for a moment, that upload will continue unaffected because it already has another path to set the traffic over. So we recommend bonding for reliability, there are also other bonding based techniques that can be used to counter issues like high latency or packet loss to make terrible modem connections more useable.

Yes, or you can host your own FusionHub server in the cloud instead if you prefer.

Same answer. Bonding requires a remote service to bond to - either SpeedFusion Cloud service or a self hosted FusionHub server.

I’ll let the full time RV guys and girls on here recommend the right hardware. I know many use the MAX Transit Duo CAT12 on primecare which is a great value device, and powerful when combined with the PUMA external antennas.

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So to make sure that I understand correctly,
Even if I have two modems in a Router - I won’t be able to combine the speed of two different SIMs without paying for Speed Fusion Cloud?

Neither I can bond single SIM + WIFI without Speed Fusion Cloud?

However I could still have Hot Failover to a 2nd SIM or WIFI?
I’m also curious if I would have 1 primary strong connection and fail over to WIFI (made just by hotspot of extra phone) for cases where I get a lag in primary connection.
Would that work and would router switch back to stronger connection after initial fail over?

I’m in Europe, I alternate between Cities that do already have 5g coverage and places that have weak 4g or H+

Having in mind of struggle to bond two connections without extra payment, I’m considering BR1 Pro 5G, but can not find it’s documentation anywhere on the peplink.com only a video on YouTube. Is the page not ready yet?

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Unless the other end that you are connected to is hosting a Fusion Hub VM appliance OR has a Peplink router that supports SpeedFusion OR you connect to the SpeedFusion cloud, then no, you can’t bond. With a single Peplink device and no Fusion Hub or Speed Fusion at the other end then all you can do is failover with two modems. There will be a small “dropout” of a handful or seconds as well for failover like this so it won’t be seamless.

I’m not sure if you can treat a Wifi connection as a WAN (you scenario where you would make a hotspot with an extra phone). Never researched or tried that. Probably a way though. Although, if you can connect to 4G+ with a phone, then you would be able to connect with the Peplink as well.

5

If you have a dual modem router that was used by loads of devices running loads of applications, the network sessions generated by those applications would be distributed across the dual modems in a load balanced fashion and you would end up using all the bandwidth available on both modems.

If you are a single user uploading a single file to a single website (which is typically a process that maintains a single IP session), that upload (and the underlying session) can only ever use a single modem - unless you use bonding. Bonding requires a remote end point - either SpeedFusion Cloud or Fusionhub (hosted in the cloud / or a datacenter) or another Peplink device hosted in a datacenter.

Bond no - not without SpeedFusion, Load balance yes.

Yes but Peplink define Hot Failover as packet level failover within a SpeedFusion connection. Without SpeedFusion Cloud / FusionHub you simply have failover, which is where the router detects there is an issue with a modem so stops using it and outbound traffic from any device that was using it will be sent via another healthy link. (good comparison here by 5G Store)

In real terms, if using SpeedFusion Bonding (and so hot failover) and a WAN link fails, traffic is rerouted so quickly that a voip call, or video call, or a file upload will typically continue unaffected. When load balancing, its very likely that all of those things will stop when the WAN fails and will need to be restarted.

Yes you can do this, or use the WIFi WAN connection within the SpeedFusion connection too.

Although 5G coverage is improving every day, every deployment I have seen so far is NSA (or Non standalone) so is still using 4G infrastructure - mainly for the upload role. if your focus is on upload bandwidth 5G doesn’t really offer much of an improvement there at least not yet until full 5G Standalone is rolled out. 5G SA is still in pilot stages I think in most countries.

If I was you, I would likely stick with a CAT12 Transit Duo now, then upgrade to a 5G device later when coverage is more complete. Dual modems will give you much more coverage and less hassle when travelling compared to a single provider - particularly if you will be on 4G most of the time.

The BR1 5G has been released in low volumes for Partner and specific project testing. Its not commercially released yet.

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Thank you for detailed answer! I’m impressed by your professionalism!
This + extra read made me understand better the diff between Bonding and Balancing and that Hot Failover is only possible over Bonded SpeedFusion Cloud.

Extra question:
Is it easy to Enable Bonding over SpeedFusion Cloud on demand - E.g. Doing critical streaming.
And use Balancing for day to day internet usage?

As of Coverage I’m often in Spain where a lot of main Cities already support 5g. And I do have an unlimited 5g data plan on my SIM.
Having extremely fast connection would be great for my backups / uploads. (Sometimes it can reach Terabytes).

But most of the case I’m in poor connection areas where as you suggested dual modem might outperform single modem.
Extra quriosity: Is router with 2 modems using 2 antennas for each modem better than 1 modem using 4 antenas in 4x4 MIMO fashion? Or the benefits would be only if those modems actually connect to different networks?

Is there a 5g version of Dual Transit coming soon?
The only Router I can see with two modems supporting 5g is [Balance 310 5G], but it seems a bit overkill and a bit more power hungry compared to BR1 5G or Transit

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Also if Peplink would be interested in using me as test case for upcoming product that meets mobile power user needs, I would be glad to share this story over my brand networks (I’m followed by a lot of Climbers and adventure people who might be interested in mobile internet solutions as well)
YT: https://youtube.com/c/hardiseasy
IG https://www.instagram.com/hard.is.easy/

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Yes. You buy a SpeedFusion Cloud Data Allowance. You can chose to use it or not but deciding which devices should send their traffic through it. Changing a device from bonding to load balancing is a couple of clicks.

Ok great. 5G would be useful then. Wills response here is a good summary of current Peplink 5G routers. I agree with him, that if you want to use the speed you’ll need a latest gen device like the HD2 MBX. Recommended Peplink Model - 5g + bonded Ethernet for Remote Live On-Site Event Production (Conferences, etc.) - #2 by WillJones

The idea behind MIMO on a single modem is carrier aggregation (using different frequencies) to the same massive MIMO serving cell. cellular modems fall into categories that define how many carriers they can aggregate and what modulation they can use etc. I explained this a bit in this post comparing a CAT6 BR1 to a CAT19 iPhone. So comparing modem to modem, more MIMO the better.

However in the real world especially when you are distant from the serving cell tower, you will likely find a dual CAT12 modem router proves to be more useful than a Single CAT 18 modem device because you can use different antennas, different SIMs and connect to different operators / cell towers using different frequencies.

No. The Dual 5G option is the MAX HD2 MBX and is highly recommended. The MAX Tranist has a throughput limitation of 400Mbps so could not support another 5G modem - and remember its 4 antenna elements per 5G modem, so there wouldn’t be enough physical space on the MAX transit enclosure.

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