It would be really nice if the balance series routers could determine when a primary ISP is having latency, jitter, packet loss, etc and have the ability to jump to another access provider on customer premises. Then be able to know when the primary or preferred ISP has the acceptable amount of latency, jitter, packet loss, etc. All while, us the balance provisioner can determine which protocols have the most priority or create a smart algorithm that knows which packets are most sensitive such as SIP, RTP.
Last year Verizon FIOS was having a region wide issue where they were updating their backbone and were having major issue with latency and packet loss that was very random and actually for a period of 24 hours blocked port 5060. The balance did not recognize this issue because the circuit was not technically “Down”. I then had to go into about 70 customers that luckily had a backup ISP and manually switch them over. It was a nightmare and very time consuming.
I think the you guys should at least look into this.
First off - your feedback and active participation on our forum is much appreciated and often quite insightful.
With respect to this product, it looks like we have quite a bit of common ground, but different strategies. While I haven’t seen these guys before, my first impression (and their direct wording) is that they are focused on end users. While we have some end user focused products, I’d say Peplink’s most advanced technologies are more focused on those building solutions, like yourself. Without having used their service, I believe you can build something similar and in many respects, better than their offering.
Have you had a chance to try out FusionHub? This is our SpeedFusion virtual appliance. It can be deployed to cloud providers or VM platforms. If you place a FusionHub (or a geo-diverse network of them) to well connected datacenters, you can create similar traffic strategies.
From my view, the key advantages to our approach are at least:
Control - we don’t give you a black box approach that you don’t have control of or insight into. We let you tweak many of the settings I imagine others don’t.
Wan Smoothing - This is certainly a big advantage. There is some secret sauce in this technology, but I can tell you that it will be much more resilient in guaranteeing applications like VoIP operate great, all the time.
Having said all of this, you mentioned this solution because you saw some advantages over ours. I can also think of some ways to improve upon what we have.
Let me know what your thoughts are and we can look at other ways to make our products fit your needs even better.
I was looking at fusionhub and watched Martin’s video on youtube and it looks pretty cool. I am not fully understanding how it works but maybe you can explain further. So from what I see with fusionhub:
I can create a virtual Peplink device and depending on who I choose to use for the datacenters, I can ask them for a static IP with a desired bandwidth.
I can ask for multiple WAN connections on my virtual peplink.
Create a speedfusion tunnel to a customer location that is also speedfusion caplable.
This will create an inbound/outbound WAN smoothing capability for our VoIP networks?
Does fusionhub only work for speedfusion or can it work with a pepvpn?
Is there any advantage using fusionhub for a customer if the customer site only has 1 ISP?
What would be the difference in going out and buying say a Balance 2500 and having say 5 ISP’s with a ton of bandwidth and linking all of my customer with speedfusion capability to my 2500’s in house? I am guessing just the cost and geographical aspect?
*BTW the bigleaf devices require I firewall behind their device. We would never steer from Peplink, I just saw it as an good inbound solution for our VoIP networks. But if you are saying I can accomplish this via all peplink then I would really like to know how this can be accomplished. Thanks
Also, how would you go about outbound policies? Our SIP servers are all hosted. I am trying to utilize the Fusionhub and Speedfusion for the WAN smoothing technology.
