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The most likely cause is bandwidth availability at the tower for that operator. We did an install last week where operator A maxed out at 45 Mbps down and 20Mbps up. We proved this by running the SIMS in dongles on two Laptops and running simultaneous speed tests on the laptops. The sum of the speedtest results equalled 45/20 or there abouts.
So we used a different operator B SIM in combination with the original one. Now we have 85Mbps down and 30Mbps up.
Frontier wrote about this issue here Peplink EU Distributor | Frontier BV | Connectiviteitspecialist
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We implement SpeedFusion solutions in the river cruise and broadcasting industries and have experienced this.
The problem is that the cells on the tower see the SpeedFusion VPN tunnel as one data session and thus give both SIM-cards 50% of the bandwidth it would normally give to one SIM-card, in this case the tower seems to handle it a bit differently.
So adding multiple SIM-cards of the same provider without any custom settings will not/barely give you benefit.
We have had some success with using just one provider, this actually was with a division of a Dutch operator that obviously refused to use any competitors SIM-cards.
This will require the operator to support more than one LTE frequency on the same tower and have sufficient coverage with both frequencies.
You can then force modem 1 on frequency 1, modem 2 on frequency 2 and so on, which should give you bandwidth gain.
This won’t work in moving situations such as a rivercruise ship though, since it’s hard to know which operator has coverage and which frequencies they use in every area.
Long story short, it’s easier (and most of the times also better) to use different operators.
EDIT: The decrease in speeds you see after bonding them, is due to the overhead on a VPN tunnel.
The overhead is usually around 10-15%.
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Post here been deleted due to age.
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50+4+3+6 = 63Mbps and in your OP you said a single SIM gets 65Mbps down so thats further evidence of lack of bandwidth at the tower.
Weighted load balancing (when all the weights are the same) is equivalent to a round robin approach and works by sending the first session out over WAN1, then WAN2 then WAN3 etc. Assuming you’re doing a speedtest.net which uses up to 4 active sessions to test throughput - the first will be sent over WAN1 it will saturate the link and then the client generates additional sessions to stress test the available bandwidth so what you’re seeing there tallies with expectations.
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This observation fits with how weighted load balancing works when running speedtests and is expected.
If you had 100 normal user activity sessions running (and by normal I mean sessions that are built, torn down and rebuilt repeatedly for multiple online activities from multiple users rather than sessions created solely to smash through all available bandwidth from a single user) then you would see more even distribution of bandwidth utilisation across all available WANs over time as the load balancing algorithm does its thing.
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A good way to test all available bandwidth across all SIMs at the same time on a HD4 is as you’re doing now. Speedtest.net (or similar) run on a wired LAN connected device. If I’m running SIMs from the same operator and see no additional bandwidth gains when using more than one SIM its a safe bet that the tower is the limiting factor.
If I’m trying to work out whats going on with SIMS from different operators I like to use the PepVPN analyser over a bonded VPN connection. That quickly shows me how much bandwidth is available per SIM/Modem and what happens when we combine different Sims from different providers (it tests bonded throughput using every possible combination of Modems). Remember though that cellular bandwidth availability is a moveable feast. At home I get 4MBps of LTE bandwidth during the day, but 20+MBps at night on the same SIM in the same router - the cause being high user density in my area when people are at work.
So setting customer expectations is of course really important. You can find yourself in a situation where two SIMS from two different operators provides no additional bandwidth gains over a single SIM because those operators might be sharing a cell tower (and its backhaul bandwidth). However the more SIMs you have, especially from different operators gives the customer the ability to get access in more locations because of the combined geographical coverage of both operators and you can combine multiple lower cost SIMs from the same operator to give you more bandwidth allowance for the month too.
We’ll use a HD4 in situations where we have high customer bandwidth allowance requirements. I can get 1.6TB of bandwidth per month on a HD4 full of SIMS from the same provider with 200GB monthly allowances per SIM, but at times I might only have 10Mbps of throughput on that device (depending on location and distance from the available cell tower).
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Hi guys,
If we connect SIM’s from the same provider to different networks should we be able alleviate the tower backhaul/limit issue?
Do you mean different bands for same provider ? Normally it should able to avoid the issue.
Again, this is really depending the service provider and the device location to the cell tower.
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Hi Sitloongs 
I meant different providers i.e.
We have Vodafone cards and using them in France… so for example connecting 1 Sim to SFR, 1 to Orange, 1 to F-Bouygues to alleviate the issue. When limited by available providers only then selecting different bands on the same network.
I don’t think this is an option.
Every regular operator, such as Vodafone, has a preferred network in other countries.
They steer the SIM-card to this preferred network when you cross the border.
If the preferred network is SFR and you connect force it to connect to Orange, the SIM-card will probably not work.
We might be able to help you however.
The company I work for supplies multi-operator SIM-cards, which gives complete freedom in choice of operator.
We can set 1 SIM-card to SFR, 1 SIM-card to Orange, 1 SIM-card to F-Bouygues and 1 SIM-card to Free Mobile.
This is ideal for SpeedFusion applications.
If you think this sounds interesting, please contact me on [email protected].
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