Peplink Balance 20 Dual-WAN Router, black (BPL-021)

I bought the Balance 20L to provide fail-safe internet service using two WANs (internet ports from two different service providers) simultaneously. At my home one WAN is provided by a cable modem, the other by an IP radio on my roof.The router was easy to configure using Internet Explorer or FireFox browser, even though in my special setup one WAN has a static IP and the other gets its IP address dynamically. It took only about 20 minutes to set up the Balance 20L. There is no special software to install on your PC, either. Everything including help files and a setup "wizard" is provided the router itself. It's the cleanest router setup I've ever used.My two WANs have different maximum data rates, and the router can be configured to direct traffic proportionately - although its default behavior configuration works just fine. The IP radio is faster than the cable modem, but is not completely reliable. The Balance 20L checks every 5 seconds whether both WAN links are working. If one fails, all traffic is switched to the other WAN port until the failed link comes back up.When both ports are up, which is 98% of the time, all my internet activities are faster and smoother than ever before. Skype works flawlessly, even when two Skype video connections are active at the same time.The Balance 20L has so far (2 weeks) been completely reliable. It correctly switched traffic several times when the IP radio link went down, and sends me an email message when either link goes down or comes back up.The Balance 20L does not incorporate a WiFi capability. But if you have a WiFi router, you can probably use it with this device. All I had to do was disable DHCP and NAT in my old WiFi router, then connect one of its LAN "switch" ports (not its WAN port) to one of the LAN ports of the Balance 20L. Presto! WiFi in the house again.I'm really delighted with this product, especially after reading about the difficulties and reliability issues some people have experienced with dual-WAN routers made by other manufacturers. This product works well. It does what's needed for home or individual use when very high reliability Internet service is an absolute requirement.

We live out in the country where all the internet is beamed around through the sky. Some of it comes through cellular phone cell towers, some through space satellites, and some through wireless relays conveniently attached to grain silos. The first two seem to be more reliable, but unfortunately have low data caps. Since we have Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and other internet videos we needed way more data than that. So using the Peplink Balance 20 Dual-WAN Router we united 2 silo internet sources.It might be worth noting that certain applications do not handle it well when the router needs to re-route the connection. If one of our silos falls over, Diablo 3 will kick me from the current game. If the silo League of Legends connects through falls over, the game has to be manually restarted. Speedtests, as a great example of how this works, will sometimes choose to route through one of our silos or the other silo, and sometimes mix the two of them. The most obvious advantages to this though is with our downloads and internet videos. I have seen stable 1 MB downloads/streams, which was never possible with only one silo standing.In terms of ordinary router operation, this is an awesome router. It's not wireless, but we'll talk about that in a second. It has DDNS service built in. The port forwarding system is pretty snazzy; you can choose which silo to route your public services through. You can monitor all bandwidth.Going wireless is easy. Connect your old wireless to the Peplink Balance 20 Dual-WAN router. Connect port 1-4 on your new router to port 1-4 on the old one. Do NOT connect them by either router's WAN/Internet/Silo port. On your old wireless router, set its IP to 192.168.0.2 and turn OFF its DHCP service. Let the Peplink Balance 20 Dual-WAN router handle that.