Trench? Wishful thinking in California. :) There's a big telephone pole behind our building, and both the cable and phone lines run from the building to the pole...
This setup is by no means good enough to run any mission critical services off of. It is, however, a big improvement over a single business line to keep a group of 30-40 people reliably connected to the internet.
Absolutely, the Peplink is a SPOF. They do support an HA mode with two Peplinks, but that hasn't been necessary for our uptime requirements yet.
It helps that the unit has been rock solid, too. Not a single crash or hickup.
We do have another (non-Peplink) router we can drop in within a few minutes, we've had to do that a few times when we were running another brand of router prior to the Peplink.
I've set up something similar with old hardware and pfSense.
It supports Multi-WAN and HA failover, and the price is nicer than the custom hardware units (as long as you can find a fast enough unit to run it on).
I love pfSense, it's a great platform! I used to run that at home for several years, and even in the early days at Sumo Logic.
The only achilles heel I've found is the fact that it runs on a PC, and PC hardware tends to have a lot more moving parts and break. You also need to take care to make configure the BIOS to turn on the PC after a power failure, etc.
pfSense is definitely a great option, but I've basically decided I'm too lazy and prefer the robustness of the Peplink. A smaller Peplink unit only runs $300-400, definitely comparable to an entry level PC...
Yeah, for consumer level ISPs in California, sadly, this is a reality. I've used Comcast, AT&T U-Verse, sonic.net, Speakeasy, etc over the years, and they all had outages.
Amongst the better ones were Speakeasy and sonic.net. Comcast is amongst the worst. Especially here on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, which is basically littered with tech startups, things are pretty bad.
Huh, that's odd. I live in Sunnyvale and have had very little trouble with Comcast connectivity for most of the last several years. There was one period of time when I was seeing frequent (> daily) connection loss, but that was cured by a cable modem upgrade.
Let me add some nuance here: We have the "business" offering from Comcast. It was the only offering that had 100MBit/s when we signed up. With the "business" offering, you are forced to use the "business" modem.
The modem is made by SMC. It is a full firewall/gateway. Unfortunately, the software on it is not very stable. For about 4-5 months, we worked with Comcast customer support to resolve this. They tried many different things to fix the issue, without success. My conclusion was that the software on the SMC modem just crashes once a day or so, and then hangs.
Eventually, I convinced them to let us use the "simple" residential Motorola modem. That has worked much better. It still crashes every 1-2 weeks, but that's almost acceptable.
Even though we don't run any office-based servers at Sumo Logic, the recommended way is to make the Peplink a DNS server. It will then serve the IP of the currently active link...
They also just sent me this in an email:
"Our revolutionary SpeedFusion technology is now available. Adding a wealth of innovations that take Peplink/Pepwave gear to the next level, SpeedFusion provides Balance users a cost-effective, high-bandwidth, and reliable alternative to using expensive MPLS connections in their branch VPNs, while SpeedFusion 4G/3G Bonding gives MAX users the ultimate in speedy and dependable networking on the road. Blazing fast, secure, and easy to manage, SpeedFusion is part of Firmware 5.4, so download this new release and become part of the SpeedFusion revolution today."
