4G & ADSL routers into a Balance 30 - anything to look out for?

I am considering the purchase of a Balance 30 for my home office. I live in the UK in a very rural location and work from home but the ADSL exchange-only line has been highly unreliable and very slow (<3Mbps), which is not the fault of the TP-Link router I use for that.

Fibre is not coming to me any time soon, but I have discovered that I can now get 3G/4G with the use of a rooftop antenna and a Huawei router and typically at higher speeds than the ADSL line. However, the 4G data charges are higher and the usage cap is low.

What I would like to do is use both networks, but ensure that YouTube and BBC iPlayer are on the ADSL line and that my work-related data goes mostly through the faster 4G link. From what I’ve read here so far, it seems that I could use a Balance 30 (I would like the additional WAN capacity) and plug the LAN ports of the Huawei and the TP-Link into two of the three WAN ports of the Balance 30, with the TP-Link in bridge mode. The Balance plugs into my switch and the switch into the patch panel and so into the LAN wiring for the house.

That should present the house network with a single combined and load-balanced flow of data up and down. And if I want wifi, which I will, then I guess I just plug an AP into a LAN port somewhere and use that.

Is the above understanding correct? Are there any gotchas I should be aware of before I go ahead with the purchase?

Thanks
Dan

Your plan sounds great and you can control the outbound traffic flow to your liking by simply making some outbound policy rules. Thanks.

Thanks Tim. Just as a follow-up to that, the 4G router’s default IP is 192.168.8.1 and the ADSL defaults to 192.168.1.1, so using them both has obviously been problematic. I basically set static IPs on my desktop and notebook PCs. Using the Balance 30, does this become a non-issue from the user’s perspective?

Dan

Since 192.168.8.1 and 192.168.1.1 are in use you would just need to change the default LAN of the Balance to something else. I recommend to put the ADSL modem into bridge mode and put the PPPoE credentials in the Balance.

Well, I have ordered a Balance 30 so I guess I will have some questions over the next few days.

Dan

Well, the Balance 30 has come and I have installed it as well as I can. It seems to be working so far, with my bandwidth soaring to very pleasing levels on the downlink. Still, I have run into a couple of early problems.

The 4G router is on WAN1, the ADSL on WAN2.



The health check failed on the 4G router using DNS. I switched it to ping using 8.8.8.8 and now it works fine.

Following the advice earlier in the topic I changed the Balance IP address to 192.168.4.1 and the IP range accordingly, which seems to work.

However, while I can access the 4G router admin page on 192.168.8.1 (I get a normal login screen) and the EnGenius wifi access point admin via its page on 192.168.4.20, I cannot access the ADSL admin page on 192.168.1.1, which just gives me a 403 error. I want to access the ADSL router to put it in bridge mode but cannot get to the admin page. Why is this?

Also, I seem to have a multiplicity of DNS settings. Should I disable the DHCP in the 4G router (current set to enabled) and the ADSL router?


Finally, the EnGenius AP is currently plugged into the switch that is plugged into the Balance. Is there any advantage in connecting it to (say) LAN2 of the Balance instead?

Thanks
Dan

I have a piece of software that accesses a client’s network using port 80 and that suddenly (for the first time, and since the installation of the Balance) can no longer find the server. Could that be related to the Balance?

Dan

Hi,

Can you please provide detail info for the software ? What is the IP address for the device that installed with the software & the software fail to access to which server ? What is the IP address for the server ?

Thank you
Regards,
Sit Loong

Thank you Sit Loong. The client’s staff are now in the office and have confirmed that they had an outage, so this was not related to the Balance. Apologies for that.

Dan

Peplink team - if somebody could respond, that would be much appreciated. My internet just slowed to basically nothing, so I had to take the Balance out of the system and I can access the net using the ADSL router without problems. I suspect this is related to the amateur installation job explained above.

Thanks
Dan

If you haven’t done so yet I would recommend creating a ticket here so that our technical team can take a closer look.

Please open a support ticket with us here so we can gather additional information to identify the issue.