Potential user questions about Surf Soho Mk 3

Product Discussion Pepwave AP & Surf
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I’m interested in purchasing the Pepwave Surf Soho MK3 and have a few clarifying questions before I go ahead. My setup will be a Primary WAN connected to Starlink and a Secondary WAN using either a Mifi M2100 5g/4g or Iphone hotspot connected by Wifi as WAN. Starlink is fast for our rural area (~100mbps down / ~20 mbps up) but suffers intermittent dropouts as it is still in beta. My main goals are to (i) Provide an automatic failover solution and (ii) Ensure uninterrupted Zoom and Teams calls for a work/school from home setup.

So far I’ve been using Speedify to bond the connections. This has worked well so far. The limitation is that Speedify cannot be installed on my kids’ school devices. My questions are:

  1. Can SpeedFusion cloud with the Surf Soho Mk3 provide both channel bonding and hot failover or only hot failover? I wasn’t sure as the device seems to support only failover and not load balancing.
  2. I’d like to restrict SpeedFusion cloud (bonding/hot failover) to Zooms/Teams - is this possible? i.e. can I bypass SpeedFusion cloud for certain applications?
  3. Can I restrict SpeedFusion cloud to be used by particular clients? e.g. not for house guests. It looks like a separate SSID can be created in the 8.1 firmware release notes - is this compatible with the Surf Soho?

Thanks in advance!

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You are correct – the latter. The SOHO uses one WAN at a time. If you want to use two (or more) the Balance series is what you want.

Absolutely. That’s the role of “outbound policies”

Certainly. Both the SOHO and Balance allow a lot of versatility in this regard. There are number of tools to help you do this.

Brief thought: It sorta sounds like the Balance series is what you may really want. We have seen quite a number of cases where folks have bought a SOHO, then in relatively short order upgraded to a Balance after seeing all the “cool stuff” the Balance router could do. The SOHO is a good “box,” but the Balance can do much more. The real question: How many WANs do you want to use at one time?

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Thanks these answers are super helpful! For the most part, I’m planning on having just a single primary WAN with 4g backup, primarily because of data caps on 4g service (15-30gb/month). The Wifi over WAN feature is key also as the MIFI 2100 doesn’t appear to be currently supported via USB and I’d rather not have additional hardware at this point. Not sure how frequent updates to supported devices are?

I’ll probably continue using Speedify to bond multiple WANs for essential Zoom calls when needed (Speedify is cheap @$30/year).

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