Allow IC2 traffic to pass on a WAN that has been disconnected due to hitting its bandwidth allowance

I’d like to see a feature improvement when using WAN bandwidth allowance where I might set a monthly allowance that when reached blocks LAN client traffic but still allows for remote IC2 management in instances where it is the only active WAN.

Either a checkbox that says always allow IC2 access, or two bandwidth thresholds,

  1. Disconnect LAN clients when usage hits a percentage &
  2. Disconnect completely when usage hits 100%
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I totally agree. We would like to reserve some data on the SIM for device management. That would be very helpful!

Hello Peplink,
@MartinLangmaid suggestion could also be useful for some of our customers Satellite locations.
Happy to Help,
Marcus :slight_smile:

I thought I had requested this in the past, but if so I cannot find the post.
Goal of this request: Be able to use SIM data limits to protect against high usage costs without losing ability to remote manage the unit.

Problem with current method: Right now if you set a cellular data limit on a pepwave, when the limit is reached the cellular connection drops completely. The pepwave is now offline and unreachable, so there is no way to try to fix the issue.

We had a customer who’s WAN was down move his three ROKU sticks to the wrong network, so he was suddenly using about 4G per hour. Between the time I got a high usage alert and when I got to a computer to log in it was too late and the cellular connection was down.

Request:
Allow us to add an outbound policy rule, or have a default rule that would be triggered by certain limits being hit. This rule would block all LAN <==> cellular traffic but allow incontrol/remote access to function.
So, on the cellular limit section be able to say
Alert at nnn usage
Block LAN to/from cellular at nnn usage
disconnect cellular at nnn usage

i.e. keep ability to set a hard safety catch limit, but well under that have ability to block LAN to/from the cellular, which SHOULD stop the excess traffic.
I could then have logged into the pepwave, looked at the client usage and said “What in the hell did you do? Go unplug those ROKU sticks dumbass!”

As it is, I constantly risk getting hammered with high usage cost because in most cases I do not have a limit set, because it is too difficult to recover from it going down.

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@jmpfas

I moved your request here.

Engineering team is considering the feasibility.

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One thought we had was to allow a set of outbound rules with a checkbox to tie to the cellular limit. SO you leave disabled, but check “Enable rule when cellular limit Level one reached”. Or a drop down for level one and level two.

That way WE can decide what is blocked, but you can still have a hard cap where it just disconnects. I would prefer to see two limits instead of percentages. But either will work

We still in discussion on how to implement this feature. Target to support this in v7.2.0 tentatively.

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Any update on this please? Would have used and actively benefited from this feature over 50 times in the past couple of months.

We use bandwidth monitoring with disconnect at 100% to protect ourselves from overages on sites where heavy usage occurs. Trouble is, once disconnected I need to do a truck roll or wait till next billing cycle before I can fix it.

Please make this one happen.

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Maybe the hitting 95% and 100% usage levels could trigger a special type of schedule? Then I could have firewall rules and outbound policies that only turn on when those usage schedules are enabled that restrict user traffic types / flows?

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Let’s light this one up again. I was pretty much promised that it would be in V8, but it is not there.
This is a very important feature request in terms of controlling cost when an idiot …I mean customer…plugs in high bandwidth devices on the switch meant for the ip phones.

I have had a few instances where someone used as much as 250G in a weekend. In control was failing to report it, so we did not get alerts. This is not common…but I am up to over 400 devices, and over the last three years, I have probably eaten $20K in excess charges that I did not feel I could pass onto the customer.
The problem with the current safety catch is that when it triggers and takes the cellular down, the device is now unreachable. We just need SOME way to block traffic, but keep IC connected. Then we could set a reasonable limit, like 20G and sleep better.

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+1 AGAIN. Come on team. This would be really bloody useful to just about anyone that has sleepless nights about overage charges…

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Hello @TK_Liew,
We are with @MartinLangmaid, we need this for both Cellular/Mobile services & Satellite services we administer for our clients.

We also really need to be able to distinguish between data used at different times of day, believe it or not the Australian NBN Co (the National Broadband Network) who is the primary (and in most situation the only) provider of rural Satellite & Fixed Wireless Internet for Australians sill uses Peak & Off Peak data rates for all customers. We have a feature request already created on this:

With the new firmware Version 8 it is a great time to be bring many of these management features getting requested into life and letting them be field tested with your supportive Peplink Partners and the Peplink Community.
Happy to Help,
Marcus :slight_smile:

This feature still targeted for firmware version 8 but not in beta firmware yet. Please stay tuned for the good news …:smile::smile::smile:

4 Likes

HI to all.

+1 on this. I too have requested a way to easily retain management of a device after the SIM data threshold is reached.
There must be a way. :wink:

Dana

The feature is included in firmware 8 RC3 :smile::smile::smile:

You can download the 8.0 RC3 using the following URL:
https://forum.peplink.com/t/balance-max-firmware-8-0-0-rc3/20972

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Let me give this a big WOHOO!. I just tested it and it does work.
I set my cellular limit to just above what I had used and checked this option, then unplugged my WAN and started a large download. As soon as it hit the limit everything went offline. Internet unreachable from the device, but incontrol/remote admin still accessible. So I connected that way and raised the limit.

This feature will literally save my at a minimum a few hundred Dollars per month, and sometimes thousands. My worst event of a surprise high usage device was almost 250G in two days. As it happens (of course) my monitoring system was not working right and I did not get notified. With this feature I can set everyone to a reasonable limit - 5G to 10G. If someone is on cell and using a lot of data and we do NOT see it and deal with it with our monitoring systems, this is the safety catch. Customer “goes down” and call us, we raise limit so they are back online, then investigate what is using so much data.

Additional enhancement requests:

  1. This triggering should be an “event” that can send notifications
  2. Dashboard should show a big “Warning! wan blocking in effect on cellular due to usage limit reached” so as soon as you log in you see it

Thank you so much for adding this.

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This feature is working very well…but now one more request. Please add device API method to set these fields. We have 400 devices on which we want to set this. API would be great.

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Can you clarify how management traffic is defined? Can we edit this list? :heart_eyes:

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@Venn, nothing to define, it is running automatically. Once the WAN reached the limit of bandwidth allowance, the WAN still allow communicating with InControl.

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Ok for incontrol, but we and our customers would like to define other critical destinations that must be maintained. Can we define a management list of ips and domains?

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