Peplink Redundancy Webinar Archive

Here's a video archive of our July 19, 2024 member-exclusive webinar with our education and action partner MobileMustHave, overviewing how Peplink achieves multi-WAN mobile internet redundancy. This video and guide are now made available to the public.

The Importance of Redundancy

We often preach the importance of redundancy in a mobile internet setup. Here are some brief reasons why:

• There is no universal “best” way online. 
• Even the most reliable connections can fail unexpectedly.
• Depending on your needs, factors such as upload speed, download speed, connection reliability, and low latency may matter more or less, depending on the situation.

• Having two (or more!) connections gives you more options to get a reliable connection that meets your needs.
• Combining two or more connections takes redundancy to the next level.

For more on why you want multiple connections: The Importance of Mobile Internet Redundancy

What Is a WAN?

WAN stands for "Wide Area Network" - basically anything upstream of your router's LAN (Local Area Network), usually the Internet.

But what if you have more than one way online, and you want to utilize multiple connections at once?

This is where a Multi-WAN router can be helpful.

Unlike traditional residential routers that typically support just a single WAN source, a multi-WAN router can juggle multiple ways onto the Internet and give you a much more robust connection.

WAN Options

Here are some of the potential WAN sources that a mobile user might want to tap into with a Peplink router:

• Ethernet WAN - An Ethernet WAN source, like a landline cable/fiber connection, or Starlink.
• USB Tethering - A Pepwave router with a USB port can often be directly connected via USB to a mobile hotspot or an Android phone. This is a very flexible way to share a connection that you might already have - while charging the phone or the hotspot at the same time.
• Embedded Cellular - Many Peplink routers have one or two integrated cellular modems that can connect wirelessly to a cellular network.
• Wi-Fi-as-WAN - A feature rarely found on traditional residential routers is support for Wi-Fi-as-WAN, which allows you to connect to a Wi-Fi network to get a router online. This might be a campground/marina Wi-Fi network, a nearby coffee shop, or even the network at a friend's house when you are parked in the driveway.
• Virtual WAN - This feature enables you to set up an additional Ethernet port on your local LAN as a secondary WAN input. This can provide you with a lot more flexibility if you have more than one Ethernet WAN source that you would like to tap into simultaneously. For more on vWAN, see our dedicated guide.

For more on routers and WAN concepts, see our guide: Mobile Routers

Ways To Combine Connections

Once you have multiple WAN options connected simultaneously, there are three basic ways to use them concurrently.

• Hot Failover - By ranking connections in priority order on the Peplink dashboard, when the highest-priority connection goes down, the next-highest connection can take over immediately. This is a good option when you have one connection that is significantly faster than others, but in case it goes down, you want another connection to take over the traffic.
• Load Balancing - Connections ranked at the same level by default divide up connections in a round-robin style. This works great if your connections are roughly equivalent in speed and latency, but things can get weird if you try to load balance a fast and a slow connection.
• SpeedFusion (Peplink's Bonding Service) - SpeedFusion specifically and bonding generally take multiple connections and combine them together into a single connection using a VPN. This requires a server or Peplink's SpeedFusion Connect service. The router combines the connections you choose and then splits and sometimes duplicates your outgoing traffic across the WAN connections. A server at the other end then combines them into a single connection and routes it to the Internet. This enables a more capable method of combining multiple connections in a way that is more reliable than load balancing alone. This is an excellent option for VoIP or video calls, where any interruption is easily noticeable or can cause a connection to drop completely. Although your speeds may not always be as fast due to some additional overhead, you have a much more robust connection with two or more internet streams combined into one.

Connections at the same priority level are load-balanced, and only once there are no connections available at the highest priority will the next-highest-priority connections be tried via failover.

For more information on mult-WAN methods, consult our guide: Bonding, Load Balancing and Failover.

If you want to dive deeper into configuring SpeedFusion Connect, see our resource article: Pepwave SpeedFusion Bonding, which also includes a webinar on the topic.

Related Resources

Here is some related content to explore:

Peplink Virtual WAN

Peplink Outbound Policy

Peplink Bonding, Loading and Failover

Peplink SpeedFusion Bonding

Mobile Routers Guide

The Importance of Mobile Internet Redundancy