Flix Keeps Its Fleet Connected Across Borders with Peplink

Fleet operators keep passenger Wi-Fi connected across borders by holding carrier SIMs in one central location and assigning them to routers remotely, instead of fitting a SIM for every country in each vehicle. On the Flix fleet, more than 700 carrier SIMs sit at RebelRoam’s datacenter, and every Peplink router connects to a central management system that assigns and manages its SIMs remotely. Network preference, failover and load balancing policies are set once for the whole fleet, so the system switches carriers automatically as vehicles move between countries. No one has to swap a SIM on board.

Intercity buses stay connected through the cellular links behind their onboard Wi-Fi, and coverage gaps and border crossings are the weak points. On FlixBus routes, each Peplink dual-cellular router draws on SIMs from various carriers, held centrally at RebelRoam’s datacenter. Failover and load balancing policies are set fleet-wide, so the router switches to the best available carrier as the bus moves, including across borders.

Passengers on a managed fleet connect to onboard Wi-Fi through a captive portal, a web page that opens on the device before it reaches the internet. Flix uses a custom captive portal across its fleet, so passengers connect the same way on any vehicle, and the operator keeps one consistent access experience.

Peplink InControl is Peplink's cloud management platform for remote configuration and monitoring. Routers can be configured and monitored from the cloud without on-site access, so a fleet operator doesn't need a technician on each vehicle to change settings. For Flix, InControl lets routers be configured remotely across every operational area on a single software configuration.

Rolling out passenger Wi-Fi solutions across an existing fleet depends mainly on how consistent each vehicle’s network settings already are. Where every vehicle runs its own settings, most of the work is replacing them with one configuration that can be applied centrally and reused, so vehicles added later join on the same setup instead of being built individually.

Peplink mobile routers are compact, rugged cellular routers for places where a fixed line is unavailable or impractical, including vehicles, remote sites and IoT deployments. The range runs from single-modem units to dual-cellular models, all managed through InControl. It includes the BR Series for compact deployments and the Transit Series, built for transportation and industrial mobile environments.