Peplink SpeedFusion Reviews

Our primary use case is for connecting the other SD-WAN. It's used for connecting from branches to headquarters. Peplink is very strong in the device for connecting within the LTE, within the SIM console. Peplink can deploy on everything, on the building, the vehicle, mobile transportation; it's very flexible.

An advantage of the solution is Peplink is very strong if we want to use it as an LTE connection.

A disadvantage for Peplink maybe the features are not as strong as those of their competitors. For example, the security itself, still uses very light web filtering and a firewall. They don't have a next-generation firewall, UTM, like the other competitors. That's the disadvantage.

I have been using the solution for the last two years.

My impression is that the solution is stable. The solution has four key features, that maybe the other competitors don't have yet. The first is a secure VPN. It's like IPsec, but their system can be more secure and already comply with PCI DSS, so we can use the Peplink solution in banking. Yeah. And then the second is if we have two or more uplinks running on Peplink and one of the links is down or broken. It'll be automatic over without breaking any session for the internet.

The third is WAN smoothing. WAN smoothing is the feature from Peplink to ensure the latency is quite low. It's very useful for a broadcasting company that needs low latency. And the latest is the bandwidth bundling, which I don't think the other competitors have these features yet. So if we have two uplinks with 10 megabits per second and 20 megabits per second, it can be bundled in two 30 megabits per second. Maybe not really 30, but maybe 28 or 27 megabits per second. It can be combined, if we bundle for the uplink. That is definitely the beauty of the feature of Peplink.

As far as the initial setup, I think all SD-WAN companies will have deployment as simple as possible. The SD-WAN itself, already has zero-touch provisioning technology. We will do the pre-configuration before we send a box out with the device. After the device arrives at the location, they just power on, plug in the internet connection, and the device will load the configuration automatically, based on what we did in the pre-configuration. Peplink already adopted zero-touch provisioning. It's very simple for onboarding.

For the licensing, I think Peplink has mostly perpetual licensing, which is good for customers that don't want an annual or subscription-based license. Any additional license that Peplink offers is perpetual-based. Maybe only extended warranty, to extend per year or per two years.

Other competitors that I have hands-on experience with are Nuage Networks from Nokia, Fortinet SD-WAN, and also the latest is Versa Network. Versa has broad features for the NG Firewall, for the UTM, for SASE, and so on. The features are very enriched for Versa. But Peplink has another feature that Versa doesn't have; it's the bandwidth bundling itself. So comparing Versa and Peplink, I think it depends on the customer itself. If the customer needs a device that has many embedded LTE slots, Peplink will match and comply with the solution. But if the customer needs a very rich feature for the SD-WAN,  Versa will comply with the requirement.

When I offer the Peplink solution to a customer, I will ask how much throughput they will use for the branches and the office, and how many uplinks. What kind of uplink, and how many users are at the branch and at the head office. Based on that information, I will calculate and find the suitable device for what they need. I make a product by bundling with many services in the telecom.

My advice that I would say to potential customers is if the customer wants to build the SD-WAN, consider the security. Consider the uplink, the LTE for the bandwidth that can be upgraded, or the bundling; Peplink is the solution. But if the customer is looking for a solution with rich security, next-generation firewall, or can be moved to SASE solution, Peplink cannot do that. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We're implementing this solution on all our sites. Basically, we want to utilize both ISPs that we have. In the past, we've only used active standby. Whenever we have outages, we want it to be seamless to be able to use the other connection with the other one being down.

We have two different models that we use. For the offices, we use Balance 380, and for our data center, we use Balance 710. We also have a fusion hub installed in the cloud for Azure and AWS. 

Right now, it is sitting in front of our firewalls. All of our sites have dual ISPs. So, we are load balancing the internet traffic, and we are using SpeedFusion between the sites.

It allowed us to be able to use both ISP connections at pretty much double the bandwidth. It also provided us the high availability. If one ISP goes down, it is usually transparent, so the users don't notice.

The SpeedFusion feature is good. It allowed us to move away from IPsec between the sites. It is also a really easy product to deploy.

Their hardware support isn't the greatest. We've had one unit go down, and it took a while for them to replace it. It was in the Caribbeans, so it might be a location-related issue.

I have been using this solution for a year or so.

It is not bad.

I can't really answer that. We do have multiple sites, but we have devices at each site, and I don't see any problems adding more sites to it. Our deployment is not too complicated, basically just combining the ISPs and using Speedfusion. Through our sites, we have about 300 to 400 users.

We have two sites left on which we would like to implement the Peplinks, and we've already migrated all of our other sites.

Their support has been okay. It's just the hardware support that needs to be better. It took a while for them to replace a unit.

This is our first SD-WAN type solution.

It is fairly easy to set up. Our first deployment took about two months from purchase to implementation. We had to reconfigure the firewall so that the Peplinks sit in front of it, and we moved the IPsec connections from the firewall to the Peplinks to handle IPsec, and then we enabled the load balancing and SpeedFusion.

We just use Google and their support pages. We currently have a team of seven for its deployment and maintenance.

The return on investment is having gained the additional bandwidth without having more expenses because we were already paying for them anyway. We pretty much cut it in half if we were to double it.

Its licensing fee is on a yearly basis. For the price, it is actually pretty good value.

It is probably one of the better values out there as compared to the other solutions. Although we haven't evaluated the other ones, the cost itself is what drove us to the solution. So far, we're happy with it.

I would rate Peplink SpeedFusion an eight out of ten.