Balance One vs 308 & VLAN questions

New to Peplink but comes highly recommended. I run a small co-op WISP and am currently using a Mikrotik CCR1009 core router. We have a handful of wireless APs around town and currently 30 members. Total growth will probably not go beyond ~50 members in the near future from this location.

We have two Internet connections, one with a /27 of public IP space and the other as a back-up connection (DHCP public). One is a 175 Mbps line and the backup is 125 Mbps (failover only). Everything in the network is on various VLANs, including a management VLAN that all of our radios, switches, etc are on.

Currently, we assign one of 4 VLANs to customer radios and serve their WAN port a private IP from a DHCP pool assigned to each VLAN. Each VLAN has a different public IP assigned to it so not all 30 members are hitting the Internet from the same public IP. If a member needs a static public, we assign that off a “public VLAN”. It looks like with the Peplink, I would end up doing a one to one NAT to solve the static public IP issue for those few members that need the static. No big deal. Lastly, we run a PPTP server on the Mikrotik that puts the VPN user onto the management VLAN so our network engineers can VPN in (from inside our outside the network) and get at all the hardware for configuration.

It looks like the Peplink software will let me do all of this exactly as we have been doing it - other than the static IP use - correct? I don’t see in the software where I can assign a static IP to a VLAN, though. Am I missing that?

In looking at the models, it looks like the Balance One will work for our needs - or am I making a mistake and should go with the 308? I don’t see us going to a 3rd WAN in the near future and we don’t use the SpeedFusion features. At the lower price of the One, I can use it for a year or two and then upgrade if we find ourselves needing additional throughput (above 600Mbps). Since all our customers run their own routers in their homes, the Peplink will only see 30 “clients”, not hundreds of devices.

Appreciate feedback and looking forward to upgrading our routing experience.

Welcome aboard! The Balance One is recommended for 1-60 users and you mention “hundreds of devices” behind the routers. The Balance 305 would be more suitable for this deployment. Throughput ratings are based on the sum of upload/download speeds for all WANs. Keep that in mind if you decide to use both WANs at the same time or increase bandwidth in the future.

Understood. I was assuming “users” was IP addresses and since the Peplink will only see 50 IP addresses, we would be OK. Each of those IP’s represents a residential Internet customer with any number of devices behind them in a NATd environment.

The recommended number of users is not a hard limit, but more of a guideline as there are other factors to consider like the number of sessions, etc.