Balance One Upgrade Choices

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

I’ve been a happy Balance One user for over a decade now. Recently I wanted to block IP addresses by Geolocation, and discovered:

  • it is possible using InControl
  • my Balance One is not eligible for InControl as it’s very out of warranty

So my choices are:

  • pay to get my ancient balance one back in InControl, which would cost $US 89/year
  • buy a new Peplink B One which would cost $300 and come with one year of PrimeCare / InControl

Benefits:

  • B One can route 1000mbps, Balance One can only do 600mbps
  • B One has WiFi 6, Balance One has only WiFi 4

Cons:

  • Balance One has 8 LAN ports, B One has only 4

So my plan is to replace the Balance One with a B One, upgrade my cable modem connection (from 500 to 1000) and then use InControl to set up GeoBlocking on the B One.

What am I not thinking of?

2

I upgraded and it’s better in every way other than LAN ports. A few things to consider:

  1. The PrimeCare cost is higher for the 5G cellular B One models, so I wouldn’t buy that if you just want to future proof yourself.
  2. The B One doesn’t require a large one-time license for SpeedFusion. Instead it relies on fairly reasonable annual subscription fees (depending on your perspective).
  3. The B One doesn’t cripple its throughput when adding additional WAN ports.
  4. The B One will get major OS updates, but the Balance One is only getting maintenance updates at this point.
  5. There are anecdotes online about the old Balance One models overheating. This was my experience too and the B One has been rock solid for me.
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3

A minor correction: you can actually buy InControl2 for an out-of-warranty Balance One, for only $29/year, not $89 as I stated above.

I went ahead and did that, and was able to get Region blocking working via InControl2 (albeit with some hiccups: Link)

I’m still likely to upgrade to a B One, given all the great points @DaveZ made above.

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4

The B One series is much, much more powerful than the Balance One, if you don’t need all the ports. An additional external switch would probably take care of the ports.

As noted above, the cellular B One’s are much more expensive for PrimeCare than the non cellular versions. The Primecare+ 4 years on the B One is the A version, and has been a great bargain, though the price has gone up now. The B One 5G needs the B version which is twice the price, that was a bit of a shock.

You also get much better WiFi with the B One, if you care about that, as well as the capability for WiFi WAN. Around where I live, Comcast/XFinity gives you free WiFi with the cable connection, so the WiFi WAN is a handy backup to have. I was surprised recently when I tried to use WiFi WAN on my old Balance One, and it wasn’t a feature.

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5

Great points about the B One advantages.

I also replaced a couple Balance One Cores with the B One, and am generally happy. The biggest downsides for me are the aforementioned reduced number of LAN ports (since I was mapping them to VLANs and then using downstream unmanaged switches) and the fact that the LAN ports are in the back. Or, the antennas and power in jack are in the front. Either way, I hate that.

I also don’t need wireless on mine, since I use external APs, but I understand why they don’t offer a Core model given the price point is pretty low.

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6

Got my B One installed, and so far I’m very pleased with the performance : I can do a 1000mbps speed test with regional firewall rules installed and CPU usage never goes above 30% (by contrast, my Balance One would struggle to do 400mbps and CPU would be pegged at 100%).

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