Will all devices be upgraded to support the new 5G or will we need to purchase newer product?
5G will likely require new cellular modules - so you’ll need to buy new products, but don’t worry. For most of us that’s still a very big corner.
If I was buying cellular hardware now I would be buying LTE-A and expect that to see me through for a long time yet - after all in some places in the UK I can still only receive 3G…
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hello Martin: It is now January 2019 and I am wondering where Peplink is with 5G coming soon. If a customer buys a Peplink 4G device like the Balance 30 LTEA from us today, how long will it be until they need to replace the device with a 5G device? From what I’m reading, 5G will be night & day improvement over 4G LTEA with capabilities that may be necessary vs luxury for VoIP, SD-WAN, etc. I appreciate your thoughts & insights into this evolution and best strategy for end users. - Tom G.
Peplink are preparing for 5G and are rolling out modular routers with changeable modems. Have a look at the EPX -obviously it’s at the very high end of the market but Peplink do have some other smaller modular models which will have more info released in the coming months.
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OK, so this is where I might go and have a moan and whinge for a moment. Get a cup of tea and strap yourself in…
In my experience if you ask people what they expect from 5G the prevalent answer is higher data rates or lower latency (or both).
Whilst it is true that 5G will bring the possibility of higher data rates, as a standard it is much more than that. Its defines a way to deliver communications for IoT devices, improves transport for broadcast video and audio, allows for localisation services (like location tracking), can improve battery life on end user equipment, allows the use of fog / edge computing, defines interfaces for Software Defined Networking and network function virtualization etc
So we should all get excited about the possibilities that 5G brings and the new opportunities we can all become part of, however there is a lot the mobile network operators will need to do to bring the full spectrum of capabilities 5G has to offer (spectrum being the optimum word).
Most network operators are focusing on their existing licensed frequency bands in use for 3G/LTE, we’re seeing massive refarming of the 3G frequencies to 4G here in the UK, to the point where 3G is often only on a single channel on a cell tower now - the rest in use for 4G/LTE-A.
But to get really stella speeds on 5G (multiple Gbps speeds) the tower and end user equipment needs to take advantage of shared spectrum usage across multiple new frequency bands.
5G on old 4G only frequency bands will have no significant increase in throughput (over LTE-A). Its simple physics…
That’s not to say we’re not already seeing great speeds on carrier aggregation under LTE-A. Vodafone here in the UK are combining massive mimo antennas with their Band 7 and an additional Band 32 as a supplementary downlink. The interesting bit here is that B32 is only used for down-link so it has to be combined with a primary carrier (a 4G/LTE carrier at that) for uplink. I’ve seen evidence of cell towers with point to point RF throughput of over 420Mbps in London and remember this is all LTE-A still, not even 5G yet.
5G promises lower latency and will achieve this using millimeter wave frequencies spectrum in the 30GHz to 300GHz range. This will increase bandwidth and lower latency but it will also require line of sight, likely hate fog and rain, and will take serious transmit power to get any kind of distance from the transmitter.
So the plan with 5G will likely include many hundreds and later thousands of smaller lower power cells delivering low latency and high bandwidth to devices within 10-20 meters if the antenna. We’re already seeing picocells (with SDRs) deployed on the top of phone booths, and on the sides of bus stops so perhaps that idea isn’t too far away for metro locations.
For rural connectivity though LTE-A is here to stay, at least until full fibre can be laid into villages and even then 5G is unlikely to penetrate much further than the village boundaries. Instead it will be LTE-A Carrier aggregation technologies on existing frequency bands delivering 80-100MBps of bandwidth to rural locations - but only once the operators have upgraded their cell tower fiber and microwave link infrastructure to support the increased capacity demands of those rural communities. Most operator estimates I’ve seen in the UK are circa 7 years to reach the level of ‘coverage maturity’ that could enable that sort of bandwidth in those places…
So no, we’re unlikely to see full support for 5G in a Peplink device for a moment or two longer - there simply is no need… yet. What we are seeing (and indeed saw at the recent partner summits) is an evolving approach to modem integration in the Pepwave product lines. The EPX is fully modular from a cellular modem perspective, so you will be able to buy a 5G cellular module later for that, and the new MBX has removable / replaceable cellular modules also.
Personally, I’m buying LTE-A by default, and special ordering the LTE only models just if the commercials on a project demand it. I’m confident that the Pepwave products will evolve in parallel with both the network operators deployment maturity and end customer demands for performance. I’m sure than one day in the next 10 years I will expect my LTE-A router to provide 1Gbps of throughput over cellular - and that Peplink will have a MAX router for sale that will be able to deliver that.
Whether I will ever actually need that much bandwidth though is another matter entirely…
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I grabbed a glass of wine for that one 
Agreed, 4G will be around for another 10 years.
Just look at 3G, especially in remote areas… some don’t even have it yet!
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Martin: Excellent answer and insight, exactly what I was looking for; i.e. confidence to sell LTE-A.
GNO-2014: How funny are you. Even better if that was a Pinot Noir.
Martin: May I share the big picture of what I’m looking to do here in the U.S.? We sell VoIP services for all of the top providers along with SD-WAN, DR and DaaS. All rely heavily upon Internet access, so I highly recommend redundant solutions to our clients. For this reason, I am trying to identify the best dual WAN solution(s) usually Coax or Fiber (primary) and 4G LTE (secondary). Based on what I’ve learned over the past 3-4 years I am a fan of the Balance 30 LTE-A for all of the usual Peplink features and advantages over other vendor’s gear. I am not a fan of Cradlepoint or other failover solutions; vs SpeedFusion. I posted a question that you answered in 2016 about Peplink vs Zyxel and your answer was to ask the client what was more important to them, Security or Uptime which I agreed with. The missing detail is that they usually reverted to price with Zyxel being half the cost of Peplink. I totally disagree with this and would like any advice you can give me on how to justify the very reasonable cost of Peplink routers. Bottom-line is I want to sell our VoIP services to the client and convince them to buy a Peplink router for redundancy . . any input is greatly appreciated.
On a second related note, I would like to convince our top VoIP provider to sell Peplink routers to their customers (30 LTE’s) and use FusionHub or something in their network to create the SpeedFusion end to end connections with dual WAN at customer site, etc. Do you know of any VoIP providers using this solution? The VoIP provider we work with is quite large with primarily U.S. data centers but also in Canada, UK, Mexico and looking to add international data centers. Can a VoIP provider use FusionHub to allow thousands of customers to have SpeedFusion redundancy to their network? Better question, what would be the best way for them to accomplish this? I may be naive, but I’m also thinking that arrangement would allow them to also provide an SD-WAN service for customers to connect multiple offices vs having to buy SD-WAN from another vendor.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated. I’ve been wrestling with these ideas for years and just don’t know how to articulate them or present this networking idea to the VoIP provider.
- Tom G.
I don’t sell Peplink routers anymore. I sell SDWAN. I explain what SDWAN is why they would benefit from it, how I can manage everything remotely and keep them online and working in extraordinary circumstances and during connectivity outage events. If they trust you and feel that they need the resilience from SDWAN you’re a shoe in to the opportunity. However if they feel like the can’t afford or justify it at the moment (and that is normally a customer who has yet to experience terrible voip over poor connectivity) then there isn’t anything to be done. Sell them a Zyxel and move on. Then, in 6 months time when they are griping about poor VoIP performance, loan them a Peplink show them how it fixes it and then swap the zyxel out.
What routers do they sell at the moment? Guess this will depend on the definition of VoIP provider, but very few SIP trunk providers here will supply connectivity along with SIP. They leave connectivity up to the ISP, re-seller / MSP or customer. Most VoIP providers I know want to focus all time efforts and cash on their core network and VoIP services rather than spend any of it at the edge on customer networks.
That said, I do think there is an opportunity to host FusionHub applainces in a datacentre with direct links to the VoIP provider and then offer the VoIP provider access to your managed service (perhaps loosely affiliated) where you can fix connectivity issues for the VoiP providers customers on their behalf. This makes the VoiP provide look good, as when customers complain they have a solution and lets the VoIP provider focus on what they do best.
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