Another Happy Customer - including Cost analysis (Australia)

Well, where to begin?

For now I am just posting a quick overview of my experiences after purchasing a Peplink 580 and 3 Peplink 310’s…

I hope this quick and concise review of my experiences with the product can help others make decision as to whether a Peplink device is right for them.

For now, a few things I wanted to mention about my experiences with Peplink so far.

First of all… who/why/ and where I am coming from… I am an IT Network Admin for a large Australian manufacturing company. Whilst we have almost 20 branch offices, My area of responsibility resides mainly in just 5 of them. My goal was to find a better solution to what we were currently running for our WAN infrastructure… and if possible, save a bit of money. That has been achieved with blazing success using Peplink products. Of course, I don’t sit here wasting my time typing up a review/feedback for any other reason except that I was so impressed with the Peplink products, that I think it deserves a mention.

1.) Customer Service…

The customer service is very friendly, very responsive, and there are no waiting times I have experienced on “hold” when calling (I could have just been lucky). Email service is excellent with great detail and you kind of get that feeling that you are dealing with a very small company at first because they are so responsive and friendly… You don’t end up sitting on hold for 20 minutes just to end up speaking with “David Jones”, “Bob” or “James Bond” from Bangalore, who then just asks you to turn it off, then back on again… I have been answered straight away and speak to someone that not only speaks fluent English, but also understands technical concepts… excellent job guys!

2.) The Product…

Both the Peplink 580 and the 310 are so easy to setup. The more advanced features are even simplified down to the point of easy drag and drop configuration options rather than having to manually type and configure complex routing rules, etc. The devices have not frozen, or skipped a heartbeat once! When I was testing 3G fallback, Setup of S2S VPN’s, aggregated throughput tests, it was all rock solid and performed exactly how you would expect (flawlessly). A ROCK SOLID product indeed. Even updating the firmware was as simple as one click and 20 seconds. This stuff is idiot-proof.

3.) The Cost & the Savings…

Now here is the big kicker that did it for me. We previously had a Private WAN infrastructure with Telstra. We used to pay approximately $4000 per month for it. It gave us a 1Mb/1Mb link in Head office and a 512Kb/512Kb link in each branch office. I negotiated with Telstra, AAPT, iPrimus, TPG and another third party called “VPN Solutions Pty Ltd”… they were all able to offer speeds of up to 4Mb/4Mb at Head Office and 1Mb/1Mb at each branch office… all for around the $4000 per month mark. VPN solutions came in close with a solution that would cost $2800 per month… but still was nowhere close to what I had in mind. We ended up using Peplinks to aggregate 4 ADSL2 links at Head office, and 2 ADSL2 links at each branch office. Each site also has a feature which was unavailable from most providers of Private Link Infrastructure – 3G Fallback… and it works perfectly. So down to the costs…

Head Office’s link has gone from being a 1Mb/1Mb to an aggregated 17Mb/5Mb. Branch offices have gone from being 0.5Mb/0.5Mb to being 17Mb/2.5Mb. These figures may not make sense at first as you would expect ADSL2 to be 24Mb/1Mb x qty… But the above values are real-world values once you take into account our distance from the exchange at each site… and the speeds which I have experienced with initial throughput tests. The difference between the performances of the links is obviously significant. And the good part… the Cost is converse to what you would expect.

Previously we were paying $3811.88 per month (plus excess download fees if we go over allowance) for our connections. Now we are paying $580 per month for our unlimited connections. That is a massive saving with the kicker of it being a much greater network. Here is the “before deployment” proposal graph I used to convince management to spend the initial capital to buy the Peplink devices… as you can see the investment into Peplink pays itself off within 2.5 months… the rest is all savings…


A picture says 1000 words… or in this case a quarter million bucks.

the WAN which we have now is in so many ways superior to anything we could have got from any provider… including the resiliancy and redundancy.

To all those that may have questions, or would like to add anything, please feel free to reply to this post and I am happy to answer any other questions regarding my experiences with the peplinks so far. If you are in Australia and not sure if you should make the jump - my advice is make it and dont look back.

All the best.

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Thank you very much for sharing this great experience! We hope you enjoy the products as much as we develop it. :slight_smile: And a heads-up… more nice features are coming!

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Wow mate, I used to work for a major construction company in Oz you would definitely have heard of, and on the project I was working on, similar story, we were paying through the nose for Optus fibre links at project head office and all our site offices.

If the IT bosses had known about this stuff it would have saved a fortune.

I only found out about Peplink products today, but I am excited about these products not only solving my own networking issue, but the possibility to sell the solution to clients who are unaware of the benefits of the product range.

Cheers

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Hi zan5hin,

We are happy to work with you if you have requirements that we can assist you with. We are carrying peplink/pepwave in Australia.

My contact details below:

Wireless Tech (Australia) P/L
www.wirelesstech.com.au

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