The route of the 42nd edition of the Dakar will take place in Saudi Arabia. The race will start in Jeddah on January 5, 2020 and will conclude 12 stages later in Qiddiyah near the Saudi capital of Riyadh after a total distance of approximately 7,900 km. The official entry list for the Dakar 2020 includes 351 vehicles for a total of 557 participants from 53 different countries.

The route of the first edition of the Dakar in Saudi Arabia explores the vast expanses of the largest country in the Middle East. Drivers and crews will face 5,000km of special stages, five of which are longer than 450km. In a country where the desert is king, 75% of the demonstration will be on sand ... all kinds of sand.

In this context, the journalist Franco Iannone turned to Know IT to have a solution available that would guarantee him a fast and reliable internet connection in order to be always online and give the public live testimonials during the course of the race.

The Peplink - Poynting solution

The solution developed for Iannone consists of a Peplink dual modem router, MAX Transit DUO LTE‐ A , and two Poynting antennas from the PUCK family . Why the Max Transit DUO LTE ‐ A? The Max Transit Duo LTE ‐ A turns out to be a versatile and powerful router. First of all, the router has two cat.6 modems equipped with slots for redundant SIMs (therefore an active SIM and 1 backup SIM for each modem): in total the router can therefore accommodate 4 SIMs. This will allow Iannone to be able to use up to 4 different operators for the best network coverage, and / or maximize the available GIGA ceiling. Thanks to the proprietary Peplink technology called SpeedFusion, the router is able to do bandwidth aggregation , guaranteeing to have available bandwidth and reliability such as to guarantee the journalist not only to easily share content such as photos and videos, but to be able to deal directly with main Social Media (eg. Instagram, Youtube ...).

The Max Transit Duo has two 5V (2A) micro ‐ USB ports to power it making it completely portable : this feature will allow you to closely follow the different stages of the race, documenting them live, thus guaranteeing spectators the desired show. The integrated GPS antenna will allow you to follow the journalist's movements step by step and will allow the Know IT team to know Iannone's exact position to always provide him with the best network configuration thanks to the cloud management console: InControl2. InControl 2, a Peplink Cloud platform, allows you to remotely manage, configure and monitor any Peplink device.

Why the choice of antennas

Puck 2 : This 2-in-1 antenna boasts 2 × 2 MIMO LTE within the same enclosure making it very easy to use thanks to its many mounting options. A product of technical excellence and solid design, this antenna offers great performance due to its small size. In fact, despite its size, it offers excellent performance especially in the higher frequency bands where performance is critical for LTE throughput and connection stability. Puck 4 : this model, in addition to having two LTE antennas like the previous one, also has a GPS / GLONASS antenna.