Review on Advanced Peplink Balance 20 Dual-WAN Router for Enhanced Internet Connectivity by Kris Feezy

I work from home so reliable internet is a must. I relied on a DSL connection when cable failed, and while I didn't have to, it quickly became obsolete when I did. I decided it was time to invest in a dual WAN router. The choices in my price range were pretty limited and most didn't sound too hot. I chose this one mainly because everything else looked like undeniable garbage. But I'm so happy I did. Out of the box it worked perfectly. For a while I was suspicious of having both WANs on at the same time (concerned about certificate errors and such) and left DSL idle. This is a cold standby, meaning it takes some time to start the second global network, get an IP address, and so on. I'd like a little more "instant" but there's no easy way. The website forums said you can set up prioritization rules that do the same thing, but I still wonder why they didn't just enable that with a simple tweak. So this is where it gets good. I decided to try load balancing mode. And boy am I not disappointed. That works great. There are no errors on all sides, and there is pure bandwidth aggregation when downloading games from Steam. I will never go into standby mode again as long as I have a concurrent standby WAN connection. The number of functions is large. They can do everything you want in a small business router and more. What I liked was the ability to bind individual no-ip addresses to different global networks. The only thing I *didn't* like is that the firewall came with the "Everyone" ruleset. I don't know if they thought their users were smart enough to set it up themselves, or if they wanted to avoid pointless technical calls from users who weren't smart enough to set up firewall rules, or both. In any case, keep this in mind and turn it on first. To sum it up: + + Load balancing works great + + + Lots of features - No hot spare setup - Default firewall set to allow everyone