How soon could Peplink add more Security features to the Balance 30 LTE? Not looking to replace customer’s firewall, just trying to win more deals against ZyXel and others who provide better Security in their smaller products for SMB customers. This would make the Balance 30 LTE a “best value” option for small offices.
Hi,
We do have feature like firewall, IP Spoofing detection, Intrusion Detection and DoS Prevention and etc. Can you share what kind of security features you are looking for?
Thanks for the response TK . . I am far from an expert on Security features, all I can tell you is that we have a partner who sells ZyXel routers and we have been trying to get him to sell Peplink instead. He tells me that the ZyXel USG-50 and 110 do similar routing to Peplink, but have far better Security features. He agrees that his ZyXel does dual WAN failover vs Peplink’s bonding, but feels the Security features are more important than a rare failover incident. Suggestion: maybe Peplink can create a Competitive Info page on your website to help us quickly identify “strengths & weaknesses” of Peplink versus your top competitors.
These 2 devices are meant to compliment one another instead of competing against.
ZyXel USG110 can be classified as NGFW (Next-Gen Firewall), another similar term will be UTM (Unified Threat Management) firewall. These are primarily focused on security features, revolved around managing local users, while our multi-WAN load-balancer are more about WAN availability and redundancy, revolved around making sure your internet/VPN connections are always available.
Nowadays most of these Next-Gen or UTM firewalls in the market can support up to dual-WAN, but there’s less focus in load-balancing capabilities like the number of WANs they can support up to, as well as load-balancing algorithm’s options and features.
As for your partner’s case, this is always a challenge that we face against reseller or end user who are confused between the 2. My usual method around this will be to first, try to explain the difference between a firewall and a load-balancer, and if that fails or they had to choose 1, ask the key question of which is more important to them, their internet/VPN connectivity, or security.
P.S. Speedfusion technologyis another key feature of our product. Firewall can’t do that…
I think this is like comparing apples with oranges a little bit to be honest. The ZyXel USG with its additional security features and focus of antispam and antivirus is a perfectly fine router, and yes it supports load balancing and usb cellular too, but it only has three load balancing algorithms (Least Load First, Weighted Round Robin and Spillover), and looks like it only supports 4 3G USB cards (at least from the manual on page 775) Huawei E220,E270,E169 and E800.
Peplink routers in comparison support 7 load balancing algorithms and well over 200 USB cellular (3G & 4G/LTE) modems, as well as web filtering, stateful firewall and IDS. We also offer really great granular control of WAN link usage using our Outbound Policies which are really easy to configure.
On top of the usual capabilities, we have InControl 2 with it’s monitoring and remote management capabilities as well as automated pepVPN/SpeedFUsion management that massively simplifies multi site / multi WAN VPN configurations. The Balance 30 LTE is also an AP Controller, has great user and application QoS functinality and has an embedded cellular modem (so can easily use an external cellular antenna).
I don’t want to get into a bun fight about security and the pros and cons of the different approaches, but personally I think that if you let spam get to your router in the first place (so wasting your precious bandwidth on traffic you will just drop when it arrives) your mail service design is already flawed, and I’d much rather have anti virus running on my devices where I can see its status and the last time it was updated than have it running on a router who’s interface I will rarely touch once I’ve configured it.
I would suggest you make sure your partner has seen how useful InControl 2 is - its a massive time and cost saver for resellers who are deploying routers for their customers, and help them understand the different approach we have taken to create simple to manage and use product. They may well want to stick with ZyXel and if so good luck to them - if they are happy with its features its a great bit of kit for what it does, but if it was me I would want to take advantage of the manageability InControl 2 provides along with the agility and options that are available with the wired and cellular WAN management we offer in our multi-wan devices.
Martin
PS Almost forgot to mention our router utility for end user device monitoring using a smartphone 