We have a PepLink Balance 20X running version 8.3.0 this year. (upgraded) We come online for a large fair this is a large bar and food venue with 25 clover POS systems. The fair provides us with a 1G Fiber line through their switches, routers yadda yadda,. This connection can be a little flakey at times event log shows DNS fails (fair blames the peplink) In the past we have used SpeedFusion cloud and done bandwidth bonding with Verizon LTE which gets quite congested during the fair.
We are thinking of adding Starlink next year and dumping the cellular connection. Thoughts?
As we are doing credit card only transactions what would you recommend. FEC High and WAN Smoothing? Should my cellular connection be in backup mode? How often should I test my WAN connection. It fails over quite often but (don’t know why) I have looked and there is no “best practices” online here.
Please help! 
Others may have ideas but as a starting point, I’d suggest:
- Substitute Starlink for cellular. If the cellular systems become overwhelmed and the carriers do not bring in extra capacity (e.g., COWs), that’s an issue. Indeed, you may wish to use cellular and Starlink. (your 20X can do that.)
- For POS, yes indeed I’d bond the connections. However, I’d not recommend FEC or WAN Smoothing. But do use Dynamic Weighted Bonding. If you were to take a look at the SpeedFusion WhitePaper to review the suggested parameters you’ll note that you likely fall outside the guidance vis-a-vis differences in probable speeds to optimize bandwidth bonding. I’d do it anyway because your objective is reliability rather than speed.
- Ensure both (or more?) of your WANs are in Priority 1. SFC (Protect) can’t use them unless they are active. For your application I do not think you want to wait for a failure of the primary WAN to switch to the backup.
- I’d recommend using known-good public DNS with distributed architecture, never that from a WAN provider. For example, we usually use 1.1.1.2 and 9.9.9.9, filtered DNS from Cloudfare and Quad9, respectively.) Everyone has their favorites – just don’t accept the defaults. (As to the accusation that the DNS issues you observed were caused by the Peplink – maybe. It is extremely unlikely the DNS failures resulted from a hardware issue. But if you relied on their provider that could have been a problem. So, it may have been a “configuration” issue.)
- Testing: First, for this application, let’s not use “fail-over.” If you really want those transactions to go through reliably and keeper those customers moving you don’t want retries and thrashing around. This is why the emphasis on multiple connections always active and directing your traffic down that tunnel. Having said that, I’d recommend monitoring what’s happening by using the tools Peplink has given you. For example, if one goes to Status → SpeedFusion VPN one can look at the behavior of the tunnels you’ve set up. Click on the two icons over on the right side and you’ll get additional information.
Bottom line: keep all connections active and monitor their behavior.
