Time to upgrade the Apple Extreme at home. House is mostly wired with multiple Cat5e Internet jacks in every room (I did that during a big renovation years ago). I have 20+ drops into a Cisco switch (not all 20 used at once, just provides options in the rooms). My town is about to upgrade our neighborhood to 1Gb Fiber in a few months (1GB upload and download). I do not need 4G / 5G, and will not use the unit for mobile (RV, etc.). I looked at the forums before writing. Most for home use were using LTE connections, and I felt it didn’t apply.
I want to stay away from consumer grade, and looked a the SOHO MK3 but looks like we’d need something like the 20x. We have 4 people at home (2 college age taking online courses when not on campus), plus my wife and I working from home. Add in Apple TVs and Xbox, etc., and there’s a lot of streaming, plus video conference calls, that can happen at one time. Is the 20X a good choice for a mostly Apple home? Will I get full 1GB passthrough (I saw 900MHz mentioned, but is that true)? Some folks are recommending that I look at Netgate, but but I’m not sure about that option. Peplink seems more stable than a Dream Machine Pro as well. I would appreciate anyone’s experience regarding passthrough, etc.
I’d consider the Balance 20X the front-runner for your use case: One WAN, multiple (mostly wired) users, 1 Gbps WAN network connection.
It is a little short on the 1Gbps WAN - but in my experience the rated throughput is close to what you get in reality. As an example, as of this moment Speed Test tells me my connection is at 950Mbps for a 1Gbps fiber connection through a switch to a Balance 380 (rated at 1Gbps) and out. I would expect the B20X to get close to the rated 900Mbps throughput.
To get from 900Mbps to 1Gbps the step up would be the Balance Two. That is a fine piece of equipment, but whether it is worth the additional cost to get those last 100Mbps? (There are other features that makes the Two attractive, but I don’t think they apply to your use case.)
An additional benefit of the B20X is that is is a PrimeCare device, which provides for an inexpensive ($49/year) warranty beyond the first year, plus a slew of additional goodies (such as management through InControl2).
Having an LTE modem in the unit does not hurt :-). For the risk-averse among us that provides for a fallback connection in case your primary ISP fails.
As a final note: If you prefer integrated, one-vendor solutions for easy management then Peplink with IC2 is quite attractive. You can run access points, switches and routers from one management interface (IC2). That makes life a lot easier, if you start working with VLANs, more than one Wi-Fi SSID and (possibly) VPNs for outside access.
I am running a B20x with 2 AP minis at home. Quite happy with it.
I have 7 SSIDS, and 4 VLANS. Also using Bonjour forwarding to allow Apple devices to airplay/AirPrint to vlan where appleTvs are hosted.
i would have liked a Peplink POE switch over my Trendnet PoE switch, but can’t toma h the cost. The 8 port rugged PoE switch is about the same cost as my B20x and 2 AP minis combined.
I don’t use Speedfusion Cloud ar home but still went for an inControl2 license so I have the option of managing and monitoring remotely. But honestly haven’t used it much.
Aaaah, but it is so lovely! I am a sucker for integrated solutions, and if fan-less then all the better. Hence the Peplink Rugged in my office.
I recently swapped out a couple of Buffalo switches. They functioned quite well, but keeping all the VLAN settings in synch across devices was becoming a pain. (And they were not fan-less.)
Cheers,
Z
PS. If anybody wants one or both of the 24-port Buffalos for the cost of their shipping then drop me a PM. I prefer equipment to be put to use.
I came from Balance One and wanted to upgrade, too, after our Cable Provider went up to 1 Gps.
I gave the B20x a try, but was very disappointed in the end as it is a lower grade device from all functionality and „look and feel“ than the Balance One. Examples: Dashboard not showing active ports, much fewer VLANs, the 2. USB WAN port delivers only 150 MBps and currently it has an issue with IPv6 stack enabled (support works on it), leading to crash on high throughput (Streaming, Speedtest). I reached max 700Mps with it only running IPv4 (which was not sufficient in our IPv6 WAN with IPv4 light/ CGNAT). So at the end I went up to a Balance Two, that I would recommend. We highly recommend also the rugged switches as we use 16 and 24 . Both are great but a little expensive.
I am hoping Peplink can let us know about future device updates. I need to order a bunch of equipment in the next month or so and want to know if I should just try to prolong or not.