Hi all,
First of all, I’d like to start this with the fact I love the Peplink product line. With a little practice, tweaking and know how, they do really offer a product that works well for remote users.
Aside from that, here are a few things that I’ve experienced in the last 7 months that may be useful to the community or people considering the product.
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Cellular: The SIM card(s) must be on a business account, at least with Verizon. I learned this the hard way. After transferring the SIM card from my Winegard to the Peplink, Verizon was happy to allow it to be activated, use it for for the last 7 months and charge me for it. Long story short, it took 2-3 weeks to replace a damaged phone back in March and another 5 hours today trying to change a plan. After talking to 6 different people this afternoon, we finally figured it out. Do no transfer a SIM from a personal account to a Peplink device unless you’re 100% satisfied with your personal plan. Peplink has apparently only teamed up with providers for business accounts. So, while the device is certified on different cell networks, us non-commercial users can’t take advantage of those SIM slots without a business account or a myriad of problems otherwise. If this is the agreement, documentation and advertisement really should be updated If not, then Peplink should really work with providers and get it right.
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SFC: SFC is great. It has a lot to offer and has saved my skin a number of times. I think it is probably well known that a private SFC tunnel between privately owned routers needs at least one side of the equation to have a public address. What isn’t clear is that all WANs on the remote side need to have a public IP address to establish a route if you want to bond on both sides. That’s perfectly fine and understandable, just doesn’t seem to be clear, in my opinion anyway. Bonding on one side, however, is great but not perfect. Some more levers would be nice. Bonding and Dynamic Weighted Bonding are good for most scenarios, but I do wish there was more granular control on each WAN.
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InControl: After installing a second device, I do love InControl. But, it does need some work. Stale configurations such as WAN names and SFC tunnels are there in perpetuity which is quite annoying. Secondary tunnels follow the profile name, not the tunnel name etc… InControl does not warn you if you don’t get it right, it simply doesn’t apply the config to the remote device. If you want clean drop downs, testing and changing configurations isn’t an option. Get it right the first time. Originally, I purchased this as a small business owner and now use it mostly for personal use, including my regular 9-5 job. Since I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars to set up a test lab for personal use, I don’t really have much of an option to tinker with settings before going to “production”.
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WAN: The WAN interface and control is very usable and ideal for the most common/static scenarios. WAN Groups, similar to Grouped Networks would be nice. As a mobile user, having to use WAN1, WAN2, Wi-Fi 2g, Wi-Fi 5g, USB and a combination of SIM/SFC 5G in an extremely dynamic environment, makes it near impossible to predict every outbound policy rule yet still enjoy the ease of rules such as lowest latency, weighted balance etc.
Otherwise, great product. It has been a game changer for someone who works 100% remote across the country. I’m always open to ideas to make my implementation better. Perhaps I’m not seeing a different path. This feedback is only meant to be constructive and help others that may have questions or similar use cases.
Happy Peplinking!