Live X Discovers the X Factor in Peplink’s Devices

Live X is a technology-as-a-service company providing live broadcasting and streaming solutions to some of the world’s highest-profile events. As a sought after broadcasting company, they needed to secure high-quality connectivity for their “mission-critical” applications. 

Challenge

Until recently, the Live X New York broadcasting headquarters’ network heavily relied on a 1G dedicated internet service, along with failover provided by a 1G business-grade connection. This setup worked well for their master control facility, but started to reveal its limits. Its dedicated internet service was also running public IPs for communications, encoding, and transmission gear.

During one of Live X’s major broadcasting events, the internet service went down, causing Live X to lose their public IPs. Despite the failover saving the broadcast, all other communications dropped. This caused much stress to the broadcasting team and Live X’s co-founder Corey Behnke understood that their network needed a change. He turned to Peplink’s partner, Castle Point Technologies, for a reliable upgrade to their setup.

Solution

Peplink devices were not new to Live X. They have been renting Peplink devices, typically the MBX Pro and SDX routers, on a per-event basis. Particularly, Live X has grown fond of Castle Point’s Castle Case “internet-in-a-box” product, a complete Peplink-based cellular and Wi-Fi solution housed in a rugged, portable case. Behnke reached out to Castle Point for a similar, but more permanent enterprise solution with the same power and reliability.

Peplink Authorized Distributor Frontier Computer Corp. and Castle Point deployed two SDX Pro routers to each branch location to create a high availability model, with at least two fiber ISPs each. Castle Point also installed two SDX Pros in their own data center to function as a SpeedFusion Hub. All deployed SDX Pros are equipped with a FlexModule to enable Hot Failover. Additionally, employees working remotely were given UBR LTE routers to use at their respective locations. 

SpeedFusion tunnels were created between all devices within each of Live X’s branches. These allowed Live X to offload their public IPs to a much stronger location, minimizing their chances of disruption. With the SpeedFusion Hub, Live X enables all the benefits of SpeedFusion, including WAN Smoothing for hypercritical processes in addition to Hot Failover.

Result

Thanks to this Peplink solution, Live X has achieved 100% uptime since its deployment. Furthermore, this new infrastructure opens up brand-new possibilities for broadcasting, on top of their remote broadcasting services.

This was tested during the 2021 New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, New York. Using a cloud-based product developed by Live X, Virtual Video Control Room, the broadcasting team managed the complete NYE 2021 production remotely.

Peplink’s SDX routers were used in a mobile vehicle to capture interviews with present partygoers. The recorded content was stored in network-attached storage connected to the internet, which allowed the team to play them back from anywhere.

With this ongoing partnership between Peplink and Castle Point Technologies, and the latter with Live X, the broadcasting company can conveniently send Castle Cases to clients to instantly introduce them to Peplink-empowered connectivity anytime and anywhere.

Deployment

SDX Pro

  • Deployed in pairs to each branch in high availability mode
  • Equipped with a FlexModule for Hot Failover and WAN Smoothing
  • Ready for mobile deployments when broadcasting live remotely

UBR LTE

  • Distributed to employees working remotely
  • Uses traffic steering to maximize to optimize traffic flow
  • Comes with PrimeCare and SpeedFusion functionality

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