Author: Peter West

  • There Is No 110%

    My team has decided I am a robot.

    They think I do not sleep, that I run on something the rest of them were not issued. The truth is a lot less impressive: I sleep, and I get tired like anyone. I have just spent years being deliberate about how I spend myself, and about who gets the best of me. I call it Never Say Tired.

    It is not a claim that I am never tired. It is a decision about what I do with the energy I have. This is why.

    I once watched a good man spend himself down to nothing.

    He woke at 3am and worked until 2 in the afternoon, an honest, full day. He gave that work everything: twelve hours at full energy, full focus, nothing held back. Nobody could fault him. He was providing.

    But by the time he walked through his own front door, there was nothing left. He would drop onto the couch, emptied out. His kids wanted to play. His wife wanted to talk. And all he had for them was the husk the workday had already spent.

    Here is what struck me. It was not that he ran out of time; he had a few hours left. It is that he had given the best of his energy to the work and saved only the leftover for the people he loved most.

    That is the thing people get wrong about Never Say Tired.

    It does not mean that if I give twelve hours to work, I owe twelve hours to my family. The math does not bend like that, and the day is not that long. Some seasons, work gets twelve hours and my family gets three or four. That is honest. That is life.

    What it means is this: the three or four hours my family gets should carry the same energy I was willing to give the work. Not the drained version. Not what is left once the good stuff is gone. The same full, present, wide-awake self I brought to earning, brought home to loving and learning, in whatever time remains.

    Because here is the truth underneath it: there is no 110%. You have a fixed amount of energy; no creative accounting, no hidden reserve you unlock by pushing harder. So the real question was never how many hours. It was what quality of you shows up in the hours you have.

    If work can have your best, your family can too. They do not need more of your clock. They need the same you, not the tired one you had decided they could settle for.

    That is not deprivation. It is clarity. When you stop believing you can give everything to everything, you start choosing, honestly, where your best self goes.

    Never say tired does not mean you will not rest. Rest is part of the hundred. It means you will never hand a watered-down version of yourself to the people who earned the whole of you, just because something else got to you first.

    You have 100%. Not of your time. Of you. Give the fullness of it to what matters, in whatever hours you get.

    Never say tired. Say: this is my 100%, and it goes to what matters.

  • Peplink Firmware 8.6 RC4: IPv6 Arrives, Plus a New Router API

    Peplink pushed Firmware 8.6 RC4 to the open beta, and this is not a minor point release. Two changes in it matter enough that I would start testing now rather than waiting for GA.

    IPv6, finally treated as first-class

    8.6 brings real IPv6 support across a wide range of cellular and Ethernet WAN interfaces. If you run dual-stack environments — or you are staring down a carrier that is quietly deprecating IPv4 on its 5G core — this is the build that lets you stop working around it. Native IPv6 handling on the WAN means fewer tunnels-to-fix-tunnels and a cleaner path as the networks underneath you keep moving.

    A new Router API

    The bigger story for anyone running fleets: 8.6 ships a revised Router API. If you manage more than a handful of devices, the difference between “log into each box” and “the network configures itself” is the difference between a hobby and an operation. A real API is how connectivity becomes automatable — provisioning, health, and policy driven from your own systems instead of a pane of glass.

    There is also Multi-APN support for 5G cellular devices and the usual list of fixes, but IPv6 and the API are the headline.

    The documents

    My take

    It is a release candidate, so it belongs in a lab and a representative staging deployment before it touches anything a customer depends on. But if IPv6 or automation is on your roadmap, RC4 is a concrete build to evaluate — and the earlier you get reps on a release candidate, the fewer surprises you hit at GA. For the kind of distributed, always-on operations I build for, both of these features move connectivity in exactly the right direction: more resilient, more automatable, less hand-holding.

  • Connectivity101, the New Enterprise, and Why I Bet on Both

    For most of business history, “the enterprise” was a place. A headquarters. Wiring in the walls, a server in a closet, and a single internet line everyone quietly prayed would stay up. When it dropped, work stopped — and that was accepted as the cost of doing business.

    That model is gone. What replaced it is what I call the New Enterprise, and it is the lens behind everything I build — including Connectivity101.

    The New Enterprise is not a building

    It is defined by where the work actually happens — which is everywhere. A job site in Shreveport. A broadcast truck. A pop-up clinic. A vessel offshore. A retail trailer that opened this morning and moves next week. The organization is distributed by default, and the thing holding it together is not a floor plan. It is connectivity.

    Which raises the stakes enormously. When your network is your business, “the internet went down” is not an IT footnote — it is lost revenue, missed SLAs, patients not seen, cameras not rolling, a crew standing around on the clock. The New Enterprise does not get to treat connectivity as plumbing. It has to treat it as infrastructure worth engineering.

    The power of getting this right

    Here is the part people underestimate: when connectivity stops being a liability, it becomes leverage. Bond cellular, Starlink, and wired together and a single-link outage never becomes an outage at all. Put a real API in front of your fleet and provisioning a new location goes from a truck roll to a template. Design resilience in from day one and you can operate confidently in places your competitors will not touch — the ship, the remote site, the temporary venue — because being connected there is your default, not your gamble.

    That is the whole thesis: the organizations that win the New Enterprise are the ones that own their connectivity instead of renting a single fragile link and hoping.

    Why I built Connectivity101

    The problem is that most people inherit their network instead of understanding it. They are handed one provider, one line, and a support number. When it fails they have no options and no idea why — because nobody ever explained how any of it actually works.

    Connectivity101.com exists to fix that. It is a plain-English resource for understanding modern connectivity — how bonding and failover really work, why “own your network” beats “rent a single link,” and how to design resilience into operations that genuinely cannot afford downtime. No vendor fog. No acronym soup. Just the fundamentals, explained the way I would explain them to a customer across the table.

    And it is organized around the places the New Enterprise actually lives — construction, events, healthcare, maritime, broadcast — because a job site and a hospital have very different connectivity problems, and generic advice helps neither. Each vertical gets the specifics it deserves.

    Where this is going

    I have spent two decades keeping organizations connected — designing SD-WAN and SpeedFusion deployments, bonding 5G and Starlink, building the Retail Connectivity Kit, running the Peplink Tech Summit. Connectivity101 is where I turn that into something other people can use, and this journal is where I will think out loud about all of it: the New Enterprise, the projects I am building, field notes from real deployments, and the travels that come with doing this work where it is needed.

    If keeping an organization connected is your problem too, you are in the right place. More soon.