Dear Peplink,
I’ve noticed in broadcast case studies people use HD2 IP67 and I don’t understand why anyone would want to place outside the vehicle, the HD2 IP67 when you can have the HD4 MBX inside the vehicle and it can provide much more capabilities. In broadcast is there not enough room in the vehicles for the equipment in some cases? I don’t understand why someone would select the HD2 IP67 product over the HD4 MBX product in broadcast.
Best regards,
Phylis Ingram
Yes, this is often done for a few reasons - space is also at a premium inside a truck, so might be better to place some equipment outside.
Because it is not always practical to route lots of antenna cables to the roof (4 coax per 5G modem these days, soon adds up when you want 4 or more), and you do not want the antennas inside what is basically a well built metal box.
Another factor can be that the internal routing of the cables might mean there is significant transmission loss on between the antenna and the router itself vs running a couple of bits of UTP data cable, we generally aim to keep any antenna runs within ~5m of the modems, running CAT6 or whatever does not present the same issues.
Or as in most of our work we tend to prefer to provide a more traditional ethernet based router inside the OB truck and then connect up whatever cell / sat / local handoff is available, over time the outdoors “Domes” can be replaced as better cellular modems become available, and those might not always be from Peplink. Have a couple of clients with 380X / 580X in the truck and then a collection of things plugged into them to provide the actual upstream connectivity.
The MBX4 is a great box, and has its place in this environment too but as with many things there is never a one size fits all approach and it is one of the nice things with Peplink they have such a broad product line you can generally build a system to do exactly what you want even if it uses multiple components to do it.