I have installed and set up most of this with the phone support of West Network Systems.
Yes we have a AP One X and a Balance 20X providing the Local Wifi to the boat. That has been working well except for the recent change to pickup the Marina Wifi via my Balance 20X Paddle Antennas and provide Local Wifi. Once we disabled the Marina Wifi on the Balance 20X the Local Wifi signal improved.
We have 15’ extensions on the 40G (comes with 6’) Flybridge Antenna so a total of 21’
Since we are running an LTE AT&T Card we would like to use the (2 extra cables) 40G to pull in the Marina Wifi when available. So we purchased the adapters and connected the other two antenna cables from the 40G to the WiFi connections on the back of the Balance 20.
If I understand your “Wifi and WAN” article it sounds like i should disable the Local Wifi from the Balance 20X and only use the AP One to provide Local Wifi to the entire boat. Its a 52’ Sedan Bridge so we werent sure if we needed both (AP One and Balance 20) sources for Local Wifi for overall good coverage. In fact thats why we purchased the AP One to provide better coverage in the front of the boat where strong signal was lacking.
I could mount the AP One in a more central location to the boat and see if that helps simultaneously turning of the Balance 20 Local Wifi.
I didnt realize and West Systems didnt caution that running Local Wifi from the Router might degrade performance. Although they did say that running two different AP’s might cloud the air with two much wifi???
Yesterday we connected the 40G Antenna extra two cables to the Balance 20 Wifi connections on the back to again pick up the Marina Wifif. West Systems simultaneously blew out all of our wifi networks (2 from the AP and two from the Balance 20) and set just a new 2.4 and 5 ghz local wifi. Sounded good but signal is poor again and having troubles reconnecting my devices via wifi.
It’s worth testing to see if the AP One will work well enough without the 20X if you intend on using WiFi as WAN. If not, and you need both, then you’ll just have to deal with the lower performance from the 20X, or you can add another AP One if you really want to.
WiFi as WAN has been around a long time, and the performance degradation is pretty well known, so I’m not sure why they didn’t mention it. Having too many APs does cause issues if you don’t tune them. Using defaults in the settings is not going to provide the best results - you usually need to choose differing channels for both 2.4 and 5 Ghz radios so that you’re not using the same ones across your own APs. Setting client thresholds, power levels, etc. can help as well. This is where a site survey or a professional installation and tuning can help.
I don’t believe you can force the 20X just to be a WiFi as WAN device - some routers have this option which makes it simpler. You may have to create a new AP Profile and assign the AP One X to it to test a new SSID, or change the old one to something else and create a new profile with the old name.
The unit is performing well but one major issue we discovered in this process is the 40G is hurting the performance of both Marina WiFi and LTE Speeds compared to the paddles antennas on the balance 20x.
I tested my Marina WiFi and LTE with the 40G connected and with the paddle antennas connected to the router.
In both cases I have better performance (up and down speed) with the paddle antennas
Antenna performance can be frustrating to tune. If you have really good cellular signals, as an example, the default antennas may work better because there is less cable between the antenna and the router, especially if the router is in a good place and not obscured. Bigger antennas will work better when you are in lower signal areas, but may not work as well in better signal areas as the default antennas, essentially.
That looks correct. Another way to verify it is to look at the AP status.
I’ve been happily using this router for a few years now on my sailboat. Was looking to provision some data for our summer cruise and was excited to see that Peplink added esim support, which would make things so much easier.
EXCEPT that this feature is locked up and only available if I pay to renew Primecare…for $149 per year. I get that they have to fund continued firmware development, and I guess they are saying the Primecare fees paid to deliver this feature (?), but it still feels pretty crummy to hold a new feature hostage for a support subscription that has zero appeal to me.
This has me thinking of switching back to a Teltonika router. Steve, you seem pretty loyal to Peplink. I guess you don’t mind the subscription fees. Have you ever looked at Teltonika? Good/bad/indifferent?
Most companies operate this way now. Even Teltonika has parts of their online and management suite that you have to pay some sort of service fee for. Many other companies that sell hardware have yearly subscription fees of some sort. Having worked before for a hardware-based company, most of those fees go to the support burden, and some to continuing development. They are also another way a company can show growth, and we all know that these companies don’t create products just for fun
I like some of Peplink’s features, but I’m not necessarily completely loyal to them. I have some GL.iNet products that I’ve been testing that are really nice, and will write about soon. Teltonika has some good stuff as well.
It comes down to what you’re interested in from a feature and user experience perspective. While GL.iNet and Teltonika have good UI’s, they are not anywhere near as easy to use as Peplink, and even Peplink is difficult compared to mainstream products. If you have to do something more complicated on Teltonika, you could be forced to go into the Luci console which is basically OpenWRT and can be intimidating for folks.
Feature wise, they all have very similar base sets, but when it comes to things like remote management, VPN, and things like SpeedFusion, that is where you have to look at the individual key things you might be using, and determine if its supported in the same fashion. For instance, if you do want to use SpeedFusion to combine multiple connections, or to do very fast failovers, that is a very Peplink-centric feature. Many others have something similar, but they don’t work as seamlessly, or require monthly/yearly subscriptions.
Always happy to have a chat and walk through what you use now to determine if one of the other manufacturers are a fit.
