Hi! Love these forums! We are live streaming outdoors and rely on cellular connection only. We do not require full HD broadcasting, and we are happy with an upload speed of 1mbps. I assume that the bonding thing is an overkill overkill, but what we do want is if a cellular provider drops below a certain speed to automatically switch to the other provider.
What is the cheapest, most portable device that will allow me to do this? I was looking at the Max On the Go, but was unclear if the load balanced version actually did this? My second choice (assuming 2-cell carriers were enough) would be the Max BR1, but I’m not clear from the language whether the feature called “Automatic Failover” is what I’m looking for because in a separate section it says I need SpeedFusion for “Hot” Failover… not sure the difference between “Hot” and “Automatic”.
Thanks so much!
Aaron
Hi @aaron1,
Unfortunatly there is no such device that monitors the active WAN’s speed and is able to switch to another connection when the speed drops below a certain point.
Automatic Failover and Hot Failover are two different things, I’ll try to explain the difference as clearly as possible.
Automatic Failover is a standard feature and has a downtime of a few seconds, because the device does not have 2 simultaneously active WAN connections.
A good example for this would be the MAX-BR1-LTE-E-T with an active WAN connection (Priority 1) and 4G in backup mode (Priority 2).
If the active WAN connection fails, the MAX-BR1-LTE-E-T will switch to 4G, but with some downtime.
SpeedFusion has 3 seperate features; Hot Failover, WAN Smoothing and Bandwidth Bonding.
Hot Failover only works in a SpeedFusion VPN tunnel, that’s why your device needs SpeedFusion support.
If you would use the MAX On-The-Go with SpeedFusion Hot Failover, you will need to build a SpeedFusion VPN tunnel with a Peplink device that also supports Hot Failover for this to work.
A good example of this would be a Peplink Balance 210, which is placed at the main office or in a datacentre.
Let’s say you have 2 active cellular connections in the MAX On-The-Go with two different operators and 1 of the 2 connections fails.
Your connection will remain active, because the 2nd Cellular connection will take over without any downtime.
This is basically what Hot Failover is, compared to Automatic Failover.
You can even go a step further by using WAN Smoothing, which resolves packet loss along the way, but this results in more data usage.
More information about the SpeedFusion technologies: https://www.peplink.com/technology/speedfusion/.
1 Like
Hi @Joey_van_der_Gaag , super helpful!
Couple follow ups:
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So there is no way to do hot failover without SpeedFusion, etc. backend support (extra hardware/VMs on the other end)
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Assuming we are ok with a few seconds of downtime, is there a way to set it up where it switches automatically, once it detects low bandwidth?
Thanks!
Hi @alawisious,
Hot Failover is part of the SpeedFusion VPN technologies, so no.
You will need 2 Peplink/Pepwave products with SpeedFusion support and create a SpeedFusion VPN tunnel between them.
You could use loadbalancing on a Peplink/Pepwave device that supports loadbalancing, which enables you to direct traffic over multiple WAN connections.
Keep in mind that this is not Hot Failover and if a WAN connection fails, the data will have to be sent through another WAN connection from the start.
You can switch from WAN connections seamlessly when using Hot Failover, so you wont have to go back to the beginning when a WAN connection fails.
Take a look at this Peplink video in which they compare loadbalancing and SpeedFusion, it might be helpful: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi5-QG0v1mo.
I’m afraid Peplink/Pepwave products do not support bandwidth based failover/loadbalancing.
Failover means that when a WAN connection goes offline, the device will switch to an available WAN connection.
Some Mikrotik products might be able to do failover/loadbalancing based on bandwidth, but you will have to do the coding yourself (which requires alot of IT knowledge, time and patience).