As Peplink’s Technology Evangelist I often get asked to compare our product and technology offering to other vendors. Its a natural question for resellers and end users to ask after all, since most have their favourite vendor equipment – often kit they have used for years, with products they are both familiar and comfortable with as well as a technology capability they fully understand.

WAN Infrastructures are evolving

In many ways Peplink products and technologies challenge many of the considered ‘norms’ in enterprise WAN management. If you asked me 10 years ago how to build a secure multi-site enterprise WAN properly I would have told you to use dedicated fiber interconnects and ISP provisioned MPLS networks. I would have said you need links with SLAs, and guaranteed bandwidth availability, and I would have said that you need some seriously qualified CISCO engineers to design, build and maintain it with a full Network Operating Center to keep an eye on its availability.

Ask me the same question today and my answer is very different. Yes I sometimes will still recommend dedicated fiber links and ISP MPLS – especially if your organisation provides high volume real-time services (like IPTV, radio broadcasting, or financial trades), but even in those instances I will still show you how you can create a cheaper, more agile, more responsive WAN that can provide a secure high bandwidth VPN connection anywhere using Peplink devices.

Multi-WAN bonding and link loadbalancing

You see, the key focus of Peplink is in Multi-WAN management and what we offer is the ability to take virtually any IP routable WAN link and make the best possible use of its characteristics for your network traffic and applications. What this means is that for existing enterprise Wide Area Networks we offer two key abilities – the augmentation of existing WAN links using additional cheap internet links, and the ability to extend the enterprise WAN to almost any location using whatever commodity fixed line or cellular connectivity is available, quickly, easily and securely.

With Peplink devices you can connect new and temporary locations to the enterprise WAN using multiple cellular links for ISP diversity (adding fixed lines when they become available) and aggregate all available bandwidth to provide rapidly deployable secure connections anywhere. We have construction companies who deploy our devices as the first IT equipment on a new building site in cabins and other temporary structures, we have police forces deploying devices into the vehicles to provide secure reliable network end point connectivity whilst on the move, and this year we even had our devices on experimental robots and unmanned vehicles being controlled from 1000’s of miles away over a secure diverse high bandwidth WAN links.

Extend your WAN to any location

Peplink gives you the ability to extend your WAN to anywhere fast. We do that by clever management of the available WAN links, by making management of the devices so easy 1st line support staff can do it, and by using our proprietary VPN bonding technology that not only makes WAN link bonding and bandwidth aggregation across multiple links easy to manage, it also makes adding and removing WAN links without complicated WAN reconfiguration possible. The WAN is no longer static with long lead times for new lines and complicated configurations only consultant level engineers can do – with Peplink it becomes agile, fluid, easy to manage and more versatile in its form factor and deployment options.

Never heard of Peplink before? You’re not alone.

Although we’ve been around since 2004, we’re only really beginning to reach a market saturation point where people have heard of us and know our name, and so we’re not always considered initially because resellers who are tendering for projects haven’t used us yet. This is slowly changing though, more and more high profile customers and projects are taking advantage of Peplink devices and technology in nearly every possible vertical as they realise a need to deliver WAN connectivity anywhere and everywhere the business needs it, efficiently, cheaply and securely.

Peplink Products and Technology

  1. Multi-WAN Access – we specialize in Multi-WAN fixed and cellular routers it’s our core business technology (not simply an add-on feature as with other vendors) and all of our devices have been designed and built with multi-wan use in mind. We can load balance across up to 13 WAN links of almost any type.
    1. Additionally we also offer VPN bonding to provide Unbreakable VPN between locations as well as Bandwidth Aggregation across multiple links.
    2. Our customers use Unbreakable VPN for Video, VoiP, POS and any other network traffic as required to guarantee access to the core network with failover to cellular included too in case fixed lines (like DSLs) fail.
  2. WLAN Controller – all of our Balance and MAX routers have inbuilt AP Controllers providing centralised management of remotely deployed wifi networks
  3. Web Content Caching – Mediafast routers using our content caching technology in combination with both cellular and low bandwidth fixed lines allow for greatly improved user experiences over these lower bandwidth links.
  4. Remote Management – InControl 2 is our Cloud management platform and provides full reporting and visibility of all Peplink devices. You can use InControl 2 to auto configure complicated VPN setups for centralized firmware management and for real time live device status information and bandwidth usage viability.
    InControl 2 also provides easy and secure access to management interfaces of remote devices.
  5. Access Points – A Full range of Access Point product options are available for consideration. All of these can be managed by the inbuilt AP controler (and made visible through InControl).
  6. Virtual VPN Concentrators – Fusionhub our virtual appliance is used by managed service providers and ISPs to offer multi-wan bonding to their customers whilst leveraging their existing hypervisor platforms and virtualised network infrastructures.

We play nice with others

Although Peplink offers a complete end to end solution for secure wide area networks and one ended multi wan load balancing, we don’t need you or your customers to do a rip and replace of existing vendor technology to be able to take advantage of the benefits we offer. In fact, we provide some really neat ways to seamlessly install our WAN management routers into existing WAN infrastructures, and our VPN technology can easily be installed alongside an existing infrastructure to extend the WAN to hard to reach places over multiple cellular or fixed links.

Even if you are happy with your current networking vendors equipment and technology and don’t see any immediate need try something new, why not try us for those awkward, hard to reach locations or sites where immediate deployment and connectivity is required. See how Peplink can make those deployments possible, how easy the kit is to configure, manage and monitor and maybe, just maybe, you might think of other places and customers where we can help too…