I have 3 FrontierDSL modems connected to Balance 30. Each modem is 9-12 Mbps. I also have Pepwave AP One connected directly to the Balance 30 LAN port. Whenever I do a speed test I see ~6 Mbps. When watching AppleTV for example, a few times I noticed that all 3 lines are utilized and the speed is great, no buffering. Most of the time however, only 1 DSL line is being used, while other 2 sit idle. So a lot of buffering going on due to that. What setting can I change in either Balance 30 or Pepwave AP One to improve performance when using Wifi for downloading files or watching Apple TV?
Based on some people’s recommendations, I changed AP One’s settings under Advanced Wireless -> Performance Tuning to:
I would check to see how your outbound policy rules are setup. By default it uses the Lowest Latency rule.
Lowest Latency:
Basically once you initiate a session out the Balance will check the latency of each WAN link and whichever one reports back with the lowest value that session will be sent out that link. Possible that possibly one WAN is consistently having the lowest latency all the time.
I would set the Outbound Policy to Custom and create a Weighted Balance rule and leave the values at default since the WAN connections have the same throughput. Save and apply those changes. This will ensure that traffic is being evenly distributed across all 3 WANs
As mentioned, the default outbound rule needs to be set to get load sharing to work well.
But video streaming is usually a single TCP connection, so it cannot be split up across the three WANs. The Peplink will not be any benefit to that situation. It might cause harm to steaming movie play, because often there is a control TCP connection and a video stream TCP connection running concurrent, and if they go on different WAN’s then the streaming service might view that as a connection failure, or account sharing violation.
If it is just a single Apple TV. You could create the following.
By source IP (of apple tv) create a rule using the priority algorithm and choose the applicable WAN to route this over.
Create another rule - source/dest/protocol any and choose weighted balance algorithm. Basically this will distribute traffic evenly over the WANs
Leave the HTTPS Persistence rule ON.
The rules due take precedence from top to bottom so order would be:
Apple TV
HTTPS Persistence rule
Weighted Balance Rule
This will allow apple TV to be routed on a dedicated WAN (with fail-over) and all other traffic will be distributed evenly across the WAN links. (HTTPS persistence rule will ensure encrypted sites stay on the same WAN link they were initiated on).