Lower price for Balance 310 firmware upgrades

The Balance 310 is targeted for small businesses according to http://www.peplink.com/products/balance/model-comparison/

After having spend a little below 900 euros for a Balance 310, an upgrade price of 400 euros (> 45% of purchase price) is quite steep, especially for a small mum-and-dad shop.

I wish a lower priced firmware upgrade possibility for Balance 310 devices.


What does and doesn’t that small business need from the Balance 310?

  • Ethernet WAN Ports: 3 (yes, most of the times 2 ports are active and only during link migrations the 3th port is active for a few weeks)
  • Drop-In Mode: no
  • Inbound Load Balancing: yes (this is the main reason to use a Peplink Balance)
  • PepVPN/SpeedFusion: no
  • DDNS: yes (as a part of the inbound load balancing)
  • Inbound port 53 UDP fallback: yes (some access providers/WAN links silently start blocking inbound port 53 traffic)

Note: a new top-of-the-bill Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Pro with 2 million x 64 byte packet (=1Gbps) routing capability costs less then a Peplink firmware upgrade.

We have not charged for firmware upgrades for a year now, please refer to the following KB article from our site:
http://www.peplink.com/knowledgebase/obtaining-your-free-firmware-license-key/
Thanks.

The KB article requires incontrol2

To be managed by InControl 2, your device must be:

  1. In-warranty or covered by InControl 2 Subscription

First time when you are trying to register a device that is Warranty Expired ] the incontrol2 system refuses to add the device.

That happened to me last time I tried, and today again. Only the second try in one session when I am trying to add a Warranty Expired ] device to Incontrol2, the device will actually be added.

Thanks for your reply, otherwise I might have replaced Peplink for a different brand. I was already investigating my other options.

Yes, and to further clarify I want everyone to know that in order to receive your free 6.x firmware unlock key you have to create an InControl2 account and add your device. It does not matter if it is out of warranty, you will still get the unlock key. You just will not be able to manage the device from InControl2 unless it is in warranty but you can still upgrade the firmware. Once you are on 6.x you will not need any unlock key to upgrade to future firmware releases. Thanks.