Can I increase cellular download speed with speedfusion bonding?

[aquablue]

Boo hooo… starlink just emailed to say we are delayed from mid-to-late 2021 to mid-2022.

So I’m wondering if I can make some headway bonding cellular with speedfusion to increase speed.

I’ve tried a couple times before, but not been successful getting a faster speed on the download side.

I’m running speedfusion on a balance with two pepwaves each with a cellular connection and a fusionhub solo in the cloud.

I currently have a data plan with verizon and one with AT&T prepaid.
When speeds are good I get
ATT 55 mbps down 12 mbps up
Verizion 45 mbps down 40 mpbs up

When things are bad I get
ATT 8 mbps down 4 mbps up
Verizion 5 mbps down 30 mbps up

So the problem is using a single cellular, there’s no way to know if something will be quick or sloooooooow.

With speedfusion I can make the connection unbreakable, and I can bond on the upload side to get faster than either individual upload speeds.

But I seem to do better on the download side manually plugging into the faster (at that time) of the two cellular and using that one only. (or setting it with wan1 priority 1 and wan2 priority 2 so it will fail over to the other cellular if the first one goes offline entirely. But it seems actually slightly faster to use one cellular than two cellular connections bonded, on the download side.)

The problem is when I need a single largish file, like a 150 MB file, it often downloads at 1 MByte per second or slightly less. Sometimes I can speedtest the other cellular and it’s running individually at 40 mbps down, but I don’t have a way for the balance to know that the one link is “slow” and to use the faster cellular at that moment it seems. I’m a single user, and need the bandwidth for a single task at a time, like downloading a single 150MB file as quickly as possible.

Any suggestions or success stories on how to achieve faster download speed using two cellular connections and speedfusion?

[MartinLangmaid]

The best way to use SpeedFusion is nearly always selectively - so just sending traffic through it that you want to be super reliable, in combination with load balancing for all other traffic.

It is likely though that your situation can be improved with some adjustments. I would suggest you use dynamic weighted bonding since you are using multiple cellular connections (turn it on on the Fusionhub also), I would also advise turning on DSl/Cable Optimization under QoS > Application on the balance which helps when we have asynchronous links.

Also, since you are using a balance I would set the upload and download speeds on the WANs to be representative of best case for those links too.

Those things should help. If they don’t help enough then your cellular connections will need some analysis to work out what’s going on to help us pick the right techniques to mitigate the underlying problems.

[aquablue]

Thanks. I did not try changing the bonding mode to dynamic weighted bonding on the fusionhub too when I gave this new (to me) mode a try, so I’ll give that a try next. Thanks!

[aquablue]

OK, upload bonding is working amazingly well.

And now with dynamic weighted bonding on both the balance and the fusionhub, download bonding is working faster than using one connection alone on some tests (it’s working!) but with something like a 31% overhead with fec off, so it’s not working quite as quickly as I would like. Need to do more tests, but used 2 GB of bandwidth and a few hours so had to take a break. Thought I’d get some input before going further. Since cellular is variable, I did two tests back to back with each configuration.

Is there any room for improvement?

Here is what I tried:

Verizion Only (ATT as Priority 2 in case WAN 1 Priority 1 fails; FEC off)
24.85 download
40.63 upload
Minimum = 72ms, Maximum = 84ms, Average = 78ms

---

FEC on Low, Bonding Dynamic Weighted

Verizion Only
24.59 download
30.81 upload
Minimum = 63ms, Maximum = 103ms, Average = 87ms

Verizon and ATT
15.87 download
47.78 upload

ATT Only
10.89 download
14.85 upload

---

ATT without speedfusion
66.65 download
20.55 upload
*unsure why speedfusion traffic isn’t moving as fast over ATT now as non speedfusion traffic; started a separate thread regarding that question.

---

FEC Off, Bonding Dynamic Weighted

Verizion and ATT
28.42 download
57.91 upload

Verizon Only
26.07 download
42.13 upload

ATT Only
15.27 download
16.76 upload

I tried setting WAN2 download bandwidth on the balance (connected to the max transit on ATT) at 200, 100, 65, 20, and 10 but didn’t see significant difference in the test numbers.

---

FEC Off, Bonding Mode Bonding
Verizon and ATT
8.65 download
58.81 upload

---

Verizon Only (ATT as Priority 2 in case WAN 1 Priority 1 fails)
22.92 download
41.54 upload

---

Different Speed Test Site (same city as fusionhub still)

FEC Off, Bonding Dynamic Weighted

verizion only
24.7 down
33 up

verizion and att
19 down
40.1 up

---

Verizon Only (ATT as Priority 2 in case WAN 1 Priority 1 fails)
26.97 download
40.55 upload

---

[aquablue]

I wish the download could be a bit more additive like the upload is…

[WillJones]

Did you enable WAN smoothing on your VPN profile?

Hard to tell from the diagram (wish Peplink would make the legend clearer as when you get a lot of empty blue triangles on top of each other they look like solid blue ones!) but all those solid blue triangles indicate as such - WAN smoothing will reduce throughput at the tradeoff of reliable transmission of data (duplicates packets, sends them via all available links and uses whichever arrives first and intact).

[Gerhard_Knecht]

I want that too. When requesting a Speedfusion Key on the Balance 20 I get forwarded to a signon - and then get the message “Only IC2-users are able to get access” - even before being asked for a password.

Where do I sign to become an IC2 user?

PS:
I have 2 Wans (down/up of 240/10 and 140/20, plus an always on USB connection 14/7)
When it is bad they go to 40/2 and 20/3 and 3/1 - and that is often all 3 at the same time.

[aquablue]

Gerhard – on the peplink homepage near the top right there is a link to incontrol 2 where you can sign in or register if you don’t have an IC2 login - https://incontrol2.peplink.com/

Will – Thanks! No I did not enable WAN smoothing.

WAN smoothing is set to off on both the fusionhub and the balance. I was also curious about that.

(I did try FEC=low on both fusionhub and balance and then turned it off for this series of tests which is why those FEC circles are to the left of these tests on the graph.)

[Gerhard_Knecht]

Thanks for the help. I purchased a Speedfusion Cloud plan and setting it up was easy. I connected 3 clouds with the main one in London. I also enabled high WAN smoothing as I have surplus bandwidth. All worked until I left the place, to be away for 3 days

The network monitor reports no connection and I have no remote access to the Balance 20.

So I was hoping to get access to the Speedfusion cloud and see the connection from the other side. Is that possible? i have been looking for it for 30 minutes now.

[Gerhard_Knecht]

It got progressively worse today until a total outage from 7:15 pm. I assume the cloud is up; so my link to the cloud is down (2 fiber channels plus one mobile network on the USB dongle).

[Gerhard_Knecht]

This is the delay in ms as reported by my monItor until the link to the cloud went down.

[aquablue]

Gerhard, I think you would get better response if you move your posts to a dedicated thread as I think your issue is very different than my issue in this thread. You should move your posts to a thread with a descriptive title of your issue and include details on how you have set your outbound policies, etc. Possibly simulate an outage of one of your wans and observe how traffic continues to flow correctly or fails.

My issue in this thread is that I have two cellular wans which have limited download bandwidth, and I was looking to squeeze as much speed as possible for a single file transfer utilizing the two cellular wans as fully as possible.

[Gerhard_Knecht]

Wrapping this up, a reboot of the Balance 20 fixed connectivity on Monday morning. Still, where is the signon to the Speedfusion cloud from remote?