I am very new to Peplink and their offerings but am also very impressed with the products based on my initial limited understanding.
USE CASE - I work with a team that captures, records, and oftentimes live streams corporate and federal events from various locations. We are in need of a reliable hardware solution that can use both venue provided ethernet Internet connectivity but also cellular for bonding and redundancy. We are also interested in a solution that can ideally work without a contractual monthly subscription service aside from paying for AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon data plans as needed.
When our on-site team isn’t capturing and live streaming from a venue during a multi-day event, we are often doing post-production at night and uploading large presentation video recordings to our media streaming platform.
Any recommendations that could potentially take a venue provided 20Mbps Down/40 Mbps Up ethernet Internet connection and provide additional stability and even increase the overall upload speed for fast video files transfers via cellular bonding would be GREATLY appreciated.
5G capable units from Peplink are relatively new and still being rolled out.
At the moment though for your use case if it were me I would be looking at either the Balance 310-5G or the HD2/4 MBX 5G.
There is frankly no point in the Transit 5G if you are planning on wanting to use Speedfusion to bond connections - the box simply does not have the horsepower to make having a 5G modem worthwhile (tops out at ~100Mbps PepVPN without encryption, we have seen 5G deliver significantly higher than that here in the UK in many places) and it only has a single modem so offers less redundancy than other routers.
In the US you may need to check around which routers have been certified by the cell carriers, perhaps someone here can offer a bit more insight into which ones will / wont work and with which data plans.
In terms of the 310 vs MBX it will in all respects probably come down to how much you want to spend, neither of these boxes will be cheap but given I know how much US convention centres and venues like to charge for bandwidth you’ll probably find the costs can be recouped quite quickly!
Both have similar throughout capabilities when it comes to Speedfusion bonding.
However, if your budget can stretch to it to me the MBX is probably the better choice:
The MBX integrates a few more LAN side switch ports, could be useful.
The MBX has more cell modems (2 or 4) - useful so you can spread the load around more carriers / data plans.
The MBX can do WiFi WAN - useful as you could even add in whatever local wireless networks were kicking around as another connection to throw into the bonding.
The MBX has multiple power inputs, you could easily supply it with power from a broadcast camera battery with a d-tap output to get DC volts into it, redundant power is not an option for the 310.
Other things to consider…
FusionHub / Bonding:
Where are you bonding traffic back to, hosting a fusion hub in a cloud provider is relatively cheap and even the low cost instances from Vult can manage a few hundred mbps of bonding. Bandwidth costs should be considered but you’d be looking at around $5-10 USD / 1Tb transfer in most cases.
Speedfusion cloud could be an option, but will likely get expensive quickly if you are throwing large files around. Consider when to use bonding vs hot failover too - bonding is nice for live TX, but not really always necessary for uploading.
Antennas:
If you end up with an HD4 MBX you will need to consider the antenna solution carefully, each of those 5G modems has 4 antenna elements - gets messy quickly!
Peplink makes a decent antenna (the Puma series) and there are other good options from Panorama, Taoglas and Parsec to investigate. At a minimum though I’d factor in the cost of 4x 4-way mimo antennas that cover the broad 5G bands, as a bunch of dipoles all crammed up against each other on the back of the unit will likely be sub optimal.
Packaging:
These boxes are not inexpensive items, have a think about how to package this for a production environment, there are people who make nice enclosures for these products that also integrate all of the antennas and so on. This to me again comes back to the point above about antennas - those QMA connectors are not the most robust of things and not designed for constantly being connected / disconnected, at the very least I’d build this into a flightcase and put a panel on the back to present the antenna connectors via some pigtails.
Find a local partner:
Says it all really, find a local partner to work with - there are plenty on these forums, I’m sure someone would be happy to get in touch with you to work out the best solution.
@WillJones - Thanks soooo much for taking the time to reply. Definitely a lot to consider but extremely helpful. I am excited to deep dive a little further into the Peplink products and really appreciate you pointing me in the general direction. Will look for some local partners as well to take the next steps. All the best and thanks again!