Webinar: Peplink with Starlink

[Neal]

 

[lemondrop9344]

Neal,
Thanks for posting this.
I have attended multiple Peplink Webinars. To some degree I expect the presenters at these webinars to push Peplink products. On the other hand, the presenters usually provide some insightful technical knowledge that makes it worth while to listen to the various marketing pitches.
The 1st presenter is a well known reseller that markets heavily to the RV market. From my perspective, his presentation provided no information that was relevant to integrating as Stalink device with any sort of Peplink device. Yes there was what appears to be a Power Point presentation showing a Stalink device attached to a high end Peplink device.
It was almost as if Starlink was an after thought in his presentation. The Webinar was entitled 'Starlink with Peplink'. It seemed to me he was more focused on emphasizing how 'wonderful' his Peplink cellular equipment performed on one of his cross country trips in his RV. How was that relevant to the subject of the webinar?
There was no mention of how he integrated the Starlink device into his network or what issues he might have encountered in the process. I believe this information would be very valuable/informative to the RV community using Peplink devices.
I must say I was extremely disappointed in the RV portion of the webinar.

 

[Neal]

Thanks for the info. Haven't watched yet.

 

[MemoriesByTheMile]

I too was hoping they would have some technical guidance on best practices and configs when using Starlink with the Peplink.

 

[Scotttkd2]

I listened until the final presenter, and had to bail out. Of the ones I saw, all were quite happy with the starlink/pepwave combination and described getting good results with both under varying degrees of difficulty caused by location and work load. They all pushed the pepwave product with its ability to load balance multiple input sources, but were short on details as to how they set them up with the exception of their specific presentation diagrams. Would be good to hear from someone on exactly how they set up, but then again, each install is going to be unique to our individuals needs and make/model of RV.

 

[lemondrop9344]

Scott, No disrespect intended, but I believe you were being very generous with regards to the RV portion of the webinar.
If you follow the Peplink forum there are a variety of posts associated with the issues associated with the Starlink & Peplink chips sets utilized with Ethernet connectivity. Peplink even boasts about how responsive they were with a firmware fix. Please don't get me wrong, I am very fond of Peplink products. I just believe a RV section of a webinar entitled 'Starlink with Peplink' should have focused more of their time on some of the known issues with integrating a Starlink device with a Peplink device. The RV presenter seemed to be more interested in pushing cellular product than informing the audience about the integration of Starlink with Peplink.
As an aside, my initial purchase of Peplink equipment was from this reseller. At that time they were very helpful. IMHO, their success as a reseller has overwhelmed their ability to provide the level of support some in the RV community could really benefit from. Of course if you are willing to pay them their consulting fee, they may be able to help you. Again IMHO, some of the technical help should have been there on the front end when selling the equipment.
To some degree I fault Peplink as their business model provides that the reseller is responsible for 1st level support. Peplink also sells through Amazon. I'm sure with Amazon's buying power they are buying in volumes with a significant discount from Peplink. I suspect Amazon is most likely selling to the low volume consumer (a home user or a RV person) at a price point lower than many of the existing Peplink partners (resellers) can even buy the equipment from Peplink. There is no way many of the existing Peplink partners (resellers) can compete on price.
If you have been following the Peplink forum, you most probably have noticed the number of posts that remain unanswered. What motivation is there for them (the lower tier resellers) to provide technical support if they did not sell the product to the customer?

 

[Scotttkd2]

Lemondrop......Sorry, travel day today so just getting a chance to reply. I don't disagree with much of anything you are saying, but I think we had different expectations of the webinar. Personally I would love to see some specific "how to fix the issues we have created for ourselves" from Pepwave, but the honest answer is they used cheap ethernet connectors/firmware combinations in many of their builds, and there is no fix except to upgrade to newer Pepwave products with higher quality components in them. Not in my personal future. Their business is cellular routers that may or may not have a WAN port that could be used to plug in a Starlink and I am confident they have no serious plans to alter that focus just because Musk is upending the cellular internet market right now. Maybe I am wrong, and they have some development in the works to marry the technology, but I'm not holding my breath. I had planned to re-listen to the presentation and find the time stamp of the comment during the conversation with the rv based reseller but after a long day on the Florida roads and traffic (and after landing the coach a bourbon) I have lost my motivation. With that said, at some point early in the presentation the Pepwave person admits that they were surprised by the amount of consumer RV oriented business they are getting, and that is the crux of my comment. Pepwave is NOT a consumer product and the video presenter admits they typically sell to enterprise and government organizations with multiple levels of IT technical people on the buyers side to make it work. The majority of their resellers are in the same model, but I do understand your comment that if an RV oriented reseller is expecting to sell these to an RV consumer level user, they need to provide a different level of support than they would need to give to an IT manager in any enterprise or his tech staff. Totally agree, but where we probably differ, is I knew this was not a consumer product when I bought it, and had no expectation of consumer level support for it. I am also disappointed with Pepwaves build quality of components that is causing the majority of current Starlink issues, but in reality they build mobile cellular routers that may or may not have a WAN interface, not mobile Starlink capable router that has cellular modems and capabilities in them. That is a big difference. Other than that, as I said I do not disagree with you overall or your observations, perhaps just different expectations from Pepwave as a vendor. Perhaps a current or new vendor will come alongside Starlink and decide there is a market for a Starlink compatible mobile cellular router and build a more compatible or integrated unit. Until then it's patch not necessarily compatible technologies together and make them work as well as we can to provide mobile internet as we individually need it to function.

 

[lemondrop9344]

Scott,
Thanks for your response. Overall, I believe you and I are on the same page, just reading different paragraphs.
As a point of reference..... When I went looking for a LAN solution for my RV (much, much research), the only commercial grade manufacturers I could find actively participating in the RV or boating market were Cradlepoint & Peplink. I'm sure there were others. However, I had been full timing & working from my RV for close to 6 months using RV park WiFi, a PC with a Sierra Wireless CAT-6 mode & my Samsung Android phones hotspot. I need to find something sooner as opposed to later. I chose Peplink.
I am mostly self taught with regards to PC's, local networks and such. I know enough to not make the same mistakes twice.
As to the quality of components in any product, corporate manufacturing entities are motivated by profit which is a function of a cost analysis performed by some 'bean counter'. The corporate entity can then use inferior components and offer an extended warranty at a profitable price point that is based on a mean time to failure rate on that product. I say this as I was a 'bean counter' in my other life.
I don't know enough about the technical aspects associated with the Ethernet issue to assess who is deficient with their Ethernet connectivity engineering. As a 'bean counter', I would like to assume there are some industry standards specifications. Reflecting on my experience with Peplink at the heart of our home office network wired with multiple Ethernet switches of different brands and multiple Ethernet wired access points of different brands which all work, I would suspect that perhaps Starlink might be the culprit. Just MHO. There is a finite number of chip makers & Stalink's proprietary cable wiring just causes me to be suspect to begin with.
With all that said, I have trouble understanding why someone insists on running Ethernet cable in a finished RV so they can connect a Starlink device to a Peplink device (comment does not apply to non Peplink products as I am not familiar with them). Yes, I understand Ethernet is supposed to be faster & more secure. However, I have yet to see any definitive data that warrants this effort in a finished RV when the WiFi by WAN is so easy with the Starlink. Connecting the Starlink device with WiFI by WAN is such a 'no brainer'. The Peplink product practically begs you to implement bandwidth bonding on the 2.4 Ghz & 5 Ghz bands of available WiFi signals or cellular signals.
The latter is representative of the types of information I think the RV folks (perhaps others) should have presented in the Webinar. Product support can be more than time consuming, depending of the knowledge of the individual needing support.

 

[Scotttkd2]

For myself, the reason for needing an ethernet connection in the WAN port is I can not use WiFi WAN and WiFi SSID on the same freq. It is a known issue with the Max Transit Duo and a few other models, and causes massive collisions and packet loss. My WiFi devices will continually connect and disconnect which causes my working full time wife to go ballistic. I have not looked in a few months but there is supposed to be a firmware upgrade to fix, but I am not seeing much activity on the Duo as a product, I think it is probably in phased out mode by now and I am not interested in spending a couple thousand to replace it after just 1 year of use. It is also not compatible with their new line of 5G sim injectors so there that as well. If I do invest again I am pretty certain I will not go with again, but I haven investigated any other options like the Cradlepoint at this point. Basically I have it doing the job I intended it to do, just with a few more tweaks and work arounds than I would have liked. It's doing the job until something better comes along that convinces me to upgrade.

 

[Neal]

While I haven't experienced that issue personally it is a simple fix. Get an external Wi-Fi router and connect it to the pepwave's LAN port. You don't have to use your Pepwave's Wi-Fi. Get a nice Wi-Fi 6E device.