What model should I buy?

Product Discussion Pepwave MAX
1

Have a site on a Sprint 4G router now…and it’s been there for YEARS. It is starting to show signs of age, not part of company VPN, etc. Looking for advice on what Peplink I should look at.

I really only need it to not NAT - want our corporate firewall to plug in and get the WAN IP. So bridge mode, IP pass-through, whatever…just as long as it is not double-NAT.
Dual SIM will be nice. I bet I can get some budget for two carriers. All the major US carriers show really good signal in the area where this device would be.

Thanks for any input!

2

I’d suggest looking at the MAX BR1 family, specifically at the MAX BR1 mini. As long as 100Mbps throughput is sufficient it does what you need it to do: IP Passthrough, redundant SIM (i.e., one radio, supporting two SIM cards - but one at a time), and the general Peplink family of goodies.
If you would like to have two simultaneous cellular connections then you would need two radios, in which case the MAX Transit Duo suggests itself. It increases throughput capacity to 400 Mbps, does load balancing and supports multi-WAN on the cellular connections. Unlike most of the BR1s it also supports 5GHz WiFi.
If you need more speed (but not two radios) then there is the MAX Transit (non-duo), also providing 400 Mbps throughput.

The BR1s and the Transits are (in our limited experience in a range of academic environments) solidly reliable, and Peplink support is excellent.

Enjoy!

Z

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3

Thanks for that info. Single connection is fine, a failover would be a good idea. I think 100mbit would be more than enough. This is going to another firewall, so no need for wifi on the device…plus I would just want this to be a cellular modem connecting to my WAN port.

4

I was looking through the manual, but not seeing where I would configure IP passthrough. Is it called something else in the configuration?

5

It may be new with firmware version 8.0.1 (currently in GA). The checkbox is in the cellular WAN settings. Here’s a screenshot from a MAX BR1 Mini LTE-A in our lab:

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6

Thanks. I was looking at https://download.peplink.com/resources/pepwave-max-user-manual-8.0.1.pdf and didn’t see it in there. That is included with the default license correct? Didn’t know if there was something additional I would need to purchase.

Understand that all traffic will pass through the MAX BR1 Mini when that is ticked. How do I get into the management of the BR1 after that is ticked?

Just making sure I cover all my bases and I really appreciate the help!

7

The MAX BR1 mini in the screenshot is pure vanilla - no additional features purchased.

You can use InControl2 (subscription for the first year is included in the purchase of the device, $29/year thereafter) or from a LAN (or PepVPN) connection employing its LAN address (e.g., 192.168.50.1), The above screenshot was made doing the latter.

Cheers,

Z

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