I’ve had a MAX Transit Duo for awhile and it’s done pretty well, but it was missing out on a bunch of the good stuff TMobile had to offer (b71 range goodness, big carrier aggregation on b41… etc), so I recently picked up a MAX BR1 Pro 5G.
The 5G is a cool icon, but the 4G performance is amazing. the internal hardware is also a very welcome step up, as It can actually sustain more than 100mbit over LTE and/or with Wifi@Wan config.
The question I have: The SpeedFusion aggregation is SO nice to have when travelling. Combining multiple carriers is amazing for availability (which is needed).
Is there a way to have the BR1 Pro 5G add each of the Cellular radios from the Duo to the Speedfusion tunnel? (I’m hosting my own endpoint)… initial testing of plugging the WAN of the BR1 into the LAN of the Duo did work for an initial test, but it didn’t expose each of the modems in the Duo (did I miss something)?
Not like that, you can’t expose both of the modems in the duo to direct control by the BR1 Pro 5G via the wired WAN, you get one connection exposed, so you can use it for failover and choosing the better carrier.
You can reverse the order, where the BR1 LAN is connected to the wired WAN of the DUO, either in NAT or Passthrough… Then you are able to control up to 5 wans at one control point… but the DUO will have the older hardware/cpu limitations.
Or you can try this. Create a Wifi SSID on your Duo with its own Vlan. Connect to this via WIFI-WAN from your BR1 5G. (Use the band 2.4 or 5Ghz that you don’t need normally) Connect the BR1 wired WAN directly to the DUO’s lan. Then with the DUO’s outbound policy make the LAN Vlan always via Duo Cell #1 and the WIFI Vlan always via Cell #2.
That should allow you to use all 4 WAN’s of the BR1, wired, Cell and Wifi-wan (both 2.4 and 5) at the same time and keep the faster hardware.
I have setup similar workarounds to what Paul is proposing where wifi-wan is used to generate more upstream connections to a single device which itself has more than one modem. In doing that it might screw with the reliability of your AP-side. If you can live without one of your wifi-bands that would be best for minimizing clashing of wifi-wan & AP.
I know its not helpful really, but I’d recommend a second BR1 Pro 5G attached to the WAN port of the 1st BR1 Pro 5G… simpler. fewer sim cards/plans, lower cost long term.
You might be using ATT+VZ+TMO and that might be really nice, but reality is only 2 carriers is good enough pretty much anywhere. 2 BR1 Pro 5g’s could ultimately outperform 1 Br1 Pro 5g + Max Transit Duo…
I have 2 BR1 Pro 5G’s w/ ATT+VZ and the second BR1 Pro 5G is attached to the main via ethernet.
@erickufrin , @Paul_Mossip
We are a peplink partner, and we did this with wifi as wan , here is a diagram of my setup.
I’m in the process of setting this up right now for a client.
This is what it will look like:
PRIMARY pepwave 5g cellular (TMO)
PRIMARY pepwave wired WAN<- from secondary br1 pro5g (VZW)
PRIMARY pepwave Wifi-as-Wan-2.4 ← from netgear LTE (ATT)
PRIMARY pepwave Wifi-as-Wan-5ghz disabled
PRIMARY pepwave LAN1 wired connection for clients
PRIMARY pepwave LAN2 wired connection for clients
PRIMARY pepwave wifi 2.4ghz wifi disabled
PRIMARY pepwave wifi 5ghz wifi connection for clients.
Satellite , line of sight, or netgear for third provider.
Netgear LTE cellular (ATT) shared via wifi to primary pepwave wifi-as-wan 2.4 ghz
Netgear LTE LAN unused
Setup the netgear wifi name and password to connect to the primary br1 pro 5g.
The new wifi network name/password to broadcast on the primary br1 pro 5g.
I’ll program the routers to load balance the cellular providers so it should just be plug and play.
Then I’ll also create seperate wifi variants for each provider so they can test each provider one at a time. We have this setup with two br1 pro 5g’s in a case with a battery and a wired wan or a small netgear for a third router. The grey lines represent the number of antennas in use on each router.
Wow, looks like there is a bit of exploration in this space already… and these solutions feel SUPER brittle… (I’ll still give em a try )
It feels like the thing that is missing, is the ability to use VLANs as WANs in Speedfusion?
If it was possible to have a setting on a new VLAN that said “Use as WAN”, it could disable the DHCP server (and any other admin/server stuff), and put that as another available WAN in the connection list.
If VLAN was able to be used as WAN, then there could be any number of devices (well, up until you run out of VLANs) participating in the Primary router, and all the devices could be connected via LAN ports… AND it would allow for more creative active/passive setups (for Mobile and/or Site-Specific setups)
Unfortunately Peplink treats every WAN port as if it was gold. On a Juniper or Cisco you would just bring up a sub interface, and any port can be lan, wan, divided into vlan’s etc. Device price was usually by CPU/throughput and # of hardwired ports only… not what each port was up to.
Yes, if they allowed us to use multiple VLAN’s on the WAN port then some people wouldn’t buy 4 WAN devices… they could use one WAN port with 4 VLANS and a $40 UBNT switch and poof… a $400 device now competes with their $1000 devices.
It actually feels a bit frustrating as a consumer here. The multi-modem solutions that are currently available are NOT an option for my budget (or I’d guess most “prosumers”)… And really, they shouldn’t be. they come with far more functionality than just “adding more modems”… the value is THERE, not in # of WANs.
We are listening. We’ll have more “prosumer” friendly products coming up but just the supply chain challenges in our industry is making the process slower than we wish.
Please continue to share with us about what is most “valuable”. We’ll see what we could do with existing devices to make our technology more accessible to everyone. Thanks.
I was impressed enough with the Duo, that I did re-up the support contract, AND bought the Pro 5G to take advantage of the CAT-22 and faster packet-routing capability… I think its good stuff
Having the ability to use the Duo to participate in another product of yours that we can pay for, SpeedFusion, would be great! It’ll keep me on the platform! When the next hotness of 5G-SA-CA comes out, bolt it on and go!
In this case, there are 2 things that would help me (and the other people posting in the thread):
The ability to create a WAN from a VLAN. A checkbox “Use as WAN” in the Network Settings screen can do that (it can even just DHCP to set itself up!). Then exposing that to SpeedFusion. *This doesn’t even have to be for the physical “WAN Port”… it can just be a VLAN in the system. It would actually be more straightforward to be able to connect the devices on the LAN ports!
The ability to tie each “modem” or “WAN” to a VLAN, when the device is acting as the Primary. I believe someone commented that can be done already… I haven’t had time to dig into this. A better UI for this would be another entry in the “Network Settings”… “Assign to WAN interface” when creating the VLAN.
All of the rest of the things to support this are in the interfaces already… it just needs to be wired up.
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