PepLink 20 for small business?

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1

So after having a bad experience with my personal internet service and Peplink (all on the ATT side), I decided to see if the PepLink 20 would work for the small business that I work for – 25 people (+ devices), mostly wireless via AP’s deployed around the office, all “office” traffic (customer facing stuff is cloud hosted).

After 20 mins on the phone with my two upstream providers, The good news is that so far the PepLink 20 is working great.

I’m nervous tho… what am I missing and/or what will bite me in the a$$ using Peplink’s low range offering?

The comparison chart http://www.peplink.com/products/balance/model-comparison/ ] point out the following between the PepLink 20 and the midrange 200-300 range models.

  • 2 WAN vs 3 WAN – im ok with two
  • Recommended users: 1-25 vs 1-50 – there’s no explanation for this … cpu load? something else? is the suggestion of 25 users based on DHCP connections? (my 25 users have 2-3 devices each) or 25 active bandwidth channels? How do I benchmark if Im stressing the poor peplink?
  • Router thruput: 100Mbps vs 200Mbps – our upstreams are “fast residential” 10Mbps and 25Mbps, so not an issue? faster inter-lan traffic (time machine backups, LAN file transfers) never makes it passed the smart switch or up to the peplink
  • load balancing algo – 5 vs 7 : ok, it might be nice to have the other two as options. But all im using now is HTTS_persistence and the stealth “lowest latency” that’s offered as a auto-default
  • Drop In mode – not relevant?
  • inbound load – no inbound traffic initiated from outside at all
  • SpeedFusion – might be nice, not a requirement at the moment
  • VPN - not a requirement
  • PepWave features - not needed, we have our own APs
  • QOS - not segmenting user-group traffic at all

So on a feature basis, I think we have the right device. Am I missing something / asking for trouble by having our entire office managed by the meager/mighty PepLink 20?

-Mark

2

Hi Mtakacs,

Thanks for the inquiry. The recommended user metric is not a hard number but more of a sizing bullet point to help choose the right Balance. The more important number to take a look at is the throughput rating and comparing that to how much traffic (both up and down) that you are pushing through the Balance.

If you start to push it, you’ll notice a few things possibly. Slow performance, high CPU load, etc, are some telltale indications that you may be pushing things a bit much.

I think though that if you have the B20 in place and things are looking good so far (day to day is working well), you should be good to go. If issues do start to crop up, let us know and we’ll see what might be going on.

I hope that helps, let us know if there’s other concerns at all.

3

Thanks for the reply! I’ll let you know how it goes.

-Mark