Deploying Peplink equipment in the mountains - and season's greeting to all!

This may or may not be appropriate for the forum - but just a piece of happiness:

Computer Engineering students at San José State University (in Silicon Valley) spent a weekend in the mountains, learning how Peplink equipment working with a range of telecom solutions enable a local community to stay in reliable touch with the world in the face of low-capacity options.

Here’s a picture, with three of the wireless/multi-WAN routers they worked with.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

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Hi @zegor_mjol,

I would be really interested in hearing more about this, especially, the location, weather conditions / temperature, etc Thank you very much for sharing.

Steve

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I expect what we do is nothing new to you - the objective for the excursion was to introduce the students to more sophisticated design options than simply plugging in a wireless (or wired) router.

Here’s what we have:

Location:

  • Yosemite National Park, in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

Environment:

  • At 4,500 feet elevation, right at the snow line (sometimes a lot of snow, sometimes none)
  • Temperature range from 0 (winter, night) to 100 degrees (summer, day) Fahrenheit

Communication options:

  • Satellite (25/5 Mbps, 600 ms latency)
  • Verizon cellular (2-20 Mbps down/up, depending on tower saturation and the location of the antennas, 40 ms latency)
  • AT&T cellular (1 Mbps on a good day - sad)

Basic setup:
On-site

  • Peplink multicellular equipment (HD2, HD2 IP67, Max Transit Duo)
  • Satellite → WAN
  • Cellular x 2
  • Antenna options: On-equipment; a yagi cellular; two MIMO MobileMark panel antennas on a pole.

Off-site

  • Fusionhub server on Vultr.com running on a California instance
  • SpeedFusion servers on Balance 380s and Balance 580s (at various locations, and with differing access technologies - metropolitan gigabit, bonded DSL, Comcast cable)

The students were trying out various configurations for communication sufficiency and cost-effectiveness. They did not discover anything that we would not already know, but they got particularly sensitized to the notion of cost-effectiveness tradeoffs (e.g., an HD2 IP67 on the pole may be worth the extra cost, because trenching an LRM 400 set of antenna cables to an indoor location is expensive when compared to a outdoor spec ethernet cable; going from one to two cellular radios may be worth it even on a single carrier; SpeedFusion may be worth it when compared to WAN balancing, and so on). They also started to understand the benefits of VPNs and observed how Verizon traffic shaping is (anecdotally) different when a consumer device connects directly to Verizon v. connecting via WiFi to a Peplink router connecting across a VPN on the Verizon infrastructure.

It was a good weekend :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Z

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