Peplink FusionHub: the virtual SpeedFusion hub that holds your tunnels

The Peplink router at the site or in the vehicle splits the data stream across all available lines and sends it through an encrypted SpeedFusion tunnel. FusionHub receives the packets as a virtual machine in the data center or in the cloud, reassembles them in the correct order and passes them on as a single connection to your servers, cloud services or the internet. If one line fails, the session carries on over the remaining ones.

Many inquiries start with a router: a MAX HD4 for the broadcast van, a MAX Transit for the bus, a Balance for the branch. The second half is often forgotten. SpeedFusion is a tunnel, and a tunnel has two ends. The router distributes the packets across DSL, LTE, 5G or Starlink; somewhere, someone has to put them back in the right order, make up for gaps and pass the data stream on as a single connection. That is the job of FusionHub.

Without this counterpart, all that is left of SpeedFusion is switching between lines. With it, you get the real features: bandwidth bonding, hot failover at packet level, WAN Smoothing against jitter and packet loss, and a fixed public address behind which all sites can be reached. A video conference keeps running when the DSL line drops; a livestream from the vehicle holds while the cellular network changes.

FusionHub is deliberately not hardware. The virtual appliance runs on the hypervisor you already operate, or as an instance in a public cloud. That puts the hub where your data needs to go: next to the ERP system in the data center, next to the cloud servers at AWS or Azure, or at Ascend if you would rather not run a hub of your own at all.

Your own data center. You have VMware, Hyper-V or XenServer in-house and want control over the counterpart. We then install FusionHub as a VM on your host, connect it to your firewall and attach the routers. Your site data never leaves your infrastructure.

Public cloud. Your applications already run at AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Vultr. In that case FusionHub belongs right next to them: the sites reach the cloud servers through the bonded tunnel, without a detour via the corporate network. Which instance size you need depends on peers and throughput; the license table above lists Peplink's AWS recommendations.

Hosted by Ascend. You do not want to maintain a hypervisor or buy a license. On our hosted VPN hub the SpeedFusion counterpart runs as a managed service in a data center in Germany, either as a shared hub per tunnel or as a dedicated hub with a static IPv4 address. The FusionHub license is then included in our price.

In all three cases the technology stays the same. The router configures itself for the hub via InControl 2, and you can switch later: a purchased license can be released in InControl 2 and imported into a new instance, for example when moving from your own host to the cloud.

Enterprises use FusionHub as a concentrator for branches, home offices and vehicles. Each site brings two or three inexpensive lines, and the hub turns them into one connection with a fixed address to the data center. This replaces costly leased lines and MPLS connections, and it lets you use cloud resources on the move without interruption. With InControl 2 you can see per site which applications and domains consume data, as a table, pie chart or connection graph.

Managed service providers run several FusionHub instances in their data center and give each customer a dedicated SpeedFusion-capable hub. The MSP Edition is billed not by tier but by client licenses: packs of 1, 10, 50, 100, 500 or 1000 peers grow with your customer base. Membership in the SpeedFusion Alliance is a prerequisite. That turns your own infrastructure into a product: faster internet at poorly connected locations, highly available site-to-site VPN over standard internet connections, bonding as a service.

What Ascend takes on in both cases: we have been on the market since 2010 and are a Peplink partner. We size the license tier based on your sites and throughput targets, install the instance on your hypervisor or in your cloud, configure tunnels, routing and firewall, attach the routers and, on request, supply the multi-network SIM too. Our support is available 24x7. If you want to master the technology yourself, you can learn it in our Peplink training on SpeedFusion and InControl 2.