EERO Pro + Balance 20 + 3 WAN/ISPs

Product Discussion
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  1. Looking for the best configuration of my Balance 20 and eero Pros?
    I like a few of the options on the eero, so should I Double NAT or do bridge mode?

  2. I have three ISPs and the Balance 20 throughput is 150mps, less than the total of my WANs.
    Should I upgrade to a different Peplink? Which one?
    I have 20-30 users, most doing Zoom as of late.

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I had Eeros before. You’ll lose a lot of the functionality in Eero I believe if you bridge them (eg parental controls etc. ) read more about that below

You could double Nat. Whatever port you plug the Eero in set it to Trunk Any. Make sure to use a different subnet on the Eero than your B20 and set WAN on the EERO to DHCP so the B20 will assign it an IP.

I think if you’re sticking with Eero might as well double Nat.

Advantage here is you get the added security of the Peplink device in front. You can enable some additional content blocking and vlans etc Tou could set up a port based vlan on the B20 and wire in a switch with some additional devices you want isolated from the Eero.

I don’t believe Eero supports vlans. But it will do a guest network which should isolate it from your main Eero network.

Edit: as for bandwidth, 150mbps is plenty for most use cases but 20-30 actual users (or devices?) is a lot of users. A typical Zoom call will use around 2-4mbps maybe? If all 30 users are doing Zoom simultaneously you still have a little headroom. But for Zoom calls you also need to check your upload.

I’m using a Balance 20x which is rated at 900mbps and is probably the next logical step up from a Balance 20. It only has 1 WAN port though! But will connect to cellular etc. I believe you can also use a USB Ethernet connection and connect another WAN via Ethernet that way.

If you want multiple WAN ports then Balance One of Balance Two. But price starts to go up from there.

I’m sure others with more experience can provide some added value. I’m just a home user. :joy::sunglasses:

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Yes, I have a lot of users, I run a grad school, a residence for a couple families and a nonprofit all out of the same big building.

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I think the Balance 20 can tell you when its time to upgrade.

  • -You can see the current CPU usage and if its often near the max, that speaks for itself. Sadly there is no cpu usage history.
  • -You can also watch current bandwidth and see if that too often maxes out at 150Mbps.

Normally you can’t watch both at the same time, but if you use two browser tabs, you can bring up both pages side by side. If you need to upgrade the Balance 20, it is indeed a hard choice, one beyond me.

Based on your last comment, it seems that you have very different groups of users. To me, this screams VLAN. Sounds like your mesh system really should support VLANs. Peplink does not do mesh but they do have a device connector which can be considered a WiFi extender. And, it should do VLANs.

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