I have been a longtime pepwave user and forum contributor. Not many posts but I found the bit defender not allowing admin access a few years back problem so thanks to all who posted a thank you and that it solved their issue.
Moving forward I have now moved to a place where my surf soho usb internet 4 g lte mdoem internet is no longer needed. I just moved into my new home and had 2 services installed. One dsl fiber to home 100 up and 100 down. soon to be gigabit once they finish updating the node in the coming months.
My cable connection which is gig down/40 up.
I would like to combine these at packet level or channel bond them if you will so that the fiber dsl line is essentially adding 100 mbps to the 900 typical download speed i get essentially putting me at a true 1 gig connection or faster and also adding 100 to the upload of 40 making my upload 140 mbps.
I have a google mesh hard wired system already in place meaning each of the 6 google wifi points i rant cat 6 too hardwired and mounted them in the ceiling. Custom mount pictures available should anyone want to see. so here is how my system is now. I am not using the fiber connection at the moment as it is slower overall.
cable modem- main google wifi mesh router- 48 port switch - google router, 2 3 4 5 have their own dedicated lines to the switch. Having wifi on the channel bonding pepwave device is not needed in anyway as you can see.
I dont want to use bridge mode on the google system because then roaming would work correctly like handing off devices to other routers as you move about. I dont and also cant have a double nat system either because of security cameras and backup servers I dial into regularly.
Is there a pepwave non wifi router that does exactly what I am looking for in terms of truly combining the fiber 100up and 100 down connection to my 940 down and 40 up cable condition. Splitting the packets evenly I guess so when I run a speed test or download a file I see 100 has been added to my overall system speed?
Can this be done without running into a double nat system so that my google wifi main router is still the system dhcp handler.
Also keep in my the throughput. In the early days I was excited when I moved to the new home weeks ago because I thought I could get a pepwave non wifi device and then use the in ceiling wifi radios but quickly noticed the “residential” grade stuff only have throughput of 150mbs to maybe 600. If what I want to do can be done I will be over 1 gig speeds.
Many here have more expertise than I do, but I’ll give you my 2 cents–
Speedfusion to a fusionhub will work great for connections which have close and low latency and no packet loss like it sounds like you will have.
I’m not sure if the great difference in upload speed will be any issue. I’d check for more input on this to make sure it’s no issue (probably not, probably just the latency of the two connections has to be close for it to work well, but I’d see if you can find someone doing a bond of two such speed connections)
The hardware necessary to do gigabit speeds will be quite robust right now. Check out the speedfusion encrypted throughput on each device you are looking for as this will require one of the higher level balance routers to achieve.
thank you very much for the reply and the link. I will take a look right now. Yes, the latency is identical between the two. Almost identical every speedtest.
Here is my problem looking over the spec sheet link you sent me. Do i need speedfusion hot failover, sppedfusion wan smoothing or speedfusion bandwidth bonding. Most definitely I want fail over with this setup as well as I am sure that’s a given based on what I am trying to accomplish but just wanted to state that as well.
Speedfusion Bandwidth Bonding will give one device behind the peplink router the combined bandwidth of both wan links minus the bonding overhead.
I did this with two 15/1 DSL links this year to achieve a 25/1.5 connection and was very pleased I did it. (those were so slow that even though the upload seems meager, going from 1 to 1.5 was a noticeable improvement.)
Great to hear! You guys are really helping me navigate the confusing way all the sd wan stuff is laid out on the site. Pepwave has the best routers and switches on the market buy sometimes their website isnt the easiest to gain answers to questions like my specific scenario so I greatly appreciate it.
Couple of follow up questions then aqualblue.
Is there a monthly fee or fee above just buying a peplink device capable of running bandwidth bonding? I was at a garage sale earlier and there was some great enterprise pepwave stuff really cheap so want to make sure if I buy the router that there isnt another fee I need.
This setup then doesn’t create a double nat then I assume? Just confirming.
You can do a fusionhub solo in a cloud instance where your only recurring cost is the cost of the cloud instance, ~$10-20 a month (you can start as low as $5/month on vultr, it may cost more if you use a ton of bandwidth and have to pay for a larger cloud instance.). If you later want to have a more complicated setup such as multiple locations or routers clustered to that fusionhub you will have to pay a license fee there too, but to start with one balance and one fusionhub, the fusionhub solo license will do. Previously there was a bandwidth limit on the fusionhub solo, but I believe this was removed and as far as I know there is no bandwidth limit on the fusionhub solo license. They are also giving a free speedfusion cloud right now, but I’m not sure where the pricing on that will be.
Be careful with garage sale equipment – one thing to note carefully is that there have been several revisions of most of the balance routers. The major model number stays the same but there is a hardware revision number. There can be drastically different throughput with the later hardware revisions compared to earlier, e.g. hardware revision 1 vs. hardware revision 4 of the same model number.
I have not actually done the setup you are proposing, but look at drop in mode. I believe it is possible without creating a double nat.
I do use alot of bandwith. I work from home. I currently use in my only fully month since living in the new home I used 4 TB. Thank you so very much for all the info and especially the revision info.I will check the hardware revision on all the stuff. It is like an estate sale type thing for a network engineer/ ham radio guy. I am a ham and thats how I knew him so hopefully the hw revisions arent to old.
If considering any ebay-type peplink purchases, you may also want to run the serial number by peplink first. The speedfusion license for the multi-wan balance router is expensive for a device if you have to buy a speedfusion license for the device and is included with many of the peplink routers purchased new from an authorized reseller.
So if your setup is planning to rely on speedfusion, make sure you have a speedfusion license included for the balance router or cost it out.
Never thought of ebay but this idea really starting taking hold of channel bonding when I saw the peplink gear the widow said was for sale. I was originally just going to use the slower fiber as a backup when cable went down
With 1 Gbps connections you would want (at least) 1 Gbps throughput by the router. Which requires a Balance Two or higher end such as one of the 3xx, a 580 etc. The throughput is under the assumption that there is no VPN (SpeedFusion) bonding, since VPN speeds are substantially lower than the basic throughput.
Would plain load balancing work for you? That would maintain the high throughput without having to shell out too much money (e.g., the Balance Two offers high throughput, but requires an additional license if you need SpeedFusion bonding).
W.r.t. used equipment: There has been a substantial improvement in throughput speeds with the recent hardware revisions. For the throughput you want you definitely need the latest hardware revisions.
So just to keep things clean an organized for not only me but anyone else can I confirm what you are saying.
Speedfusion with bandwidth bonding is the serivce I need to make sure any of the compatible throughput routers has. Speedfusion is creating a vpn type deal I hope but its simply a service that runs on the router before my google home wifi main unit that supplies the google home main unit which is the dhcp handler one big pipe of both connections. It doesnt say oh this person is youtube so let me use the connection and this person is skpye so let me use fiber it is flat out max bandwidth from both providers on all things on all devices?
I don’t dare buy any peplink gear myself from ebay; I’ve bought all my peplink gear from a peplink authorized reseller because it includes the license. I kind of cringe when I see ebay auctions with serial numbers posted because those are used to register devices with incontrol, etc. I don’t know how often it happens, but I’ve seen a couple posts from people buying devices from non-authorized sources where they can’t get a feature to work because of the license… I spend enough time trying to get the internet connections working in remote locations, that I chose to just pay a lot for the peplink hardware new.
ok so I will stay away from ebay. like i said was never a thought. these are coming from a estate sale from a ham radio guy that was a networking engineer of some sort. I called his widow just now whom I known known for years and she said he bought all that internet stuff in the box I was looking at 2 years ago
You could also look at a combination of load balancing and speedfusion. You could put devices that need a truly unbreakable connection over speedfusion and other devices such as streaming tv over one of the wans.
Just to set expectations, if you take 100 + 40 on the upload side, you have to figure the overhead is around 20% best case. So you end up with 140x.8 = 110 mbps. On the download side 900+100 x .8= 800mbps best case. So you could use speedfusion to get noticeably more upload than the 900/40 (as long as the great difference between the two connections doesn’t present a problem; check with someone else first on this to be sure) and somewhat less download and have an unbreakable connection.
You could put other devices such as streaming tvs over the gigabit wan directly so they don’t subtract from the speedfusion throughput (limited by the cpu of the balance router)
those overhead numbers are fantastic. I have 13 nest cameras recording or uploading every second of everyday to the cloud so 110 upload or even 90 upload will relieve the strain.
I just finished installing my Dish network once again. 12 receivers so that basically cut out 12 apple tv’s all using various streaming tv providers. Did that when sony pulled the plug.
If you actually want to “combine” what’s connected to your house, you need a second point to combine that bandwidth at. So it functions like a vpn where your traffic comes from your house over multiple links to a cloud instance (or second balance router if you have a place with enough bandwidth to put a second router).
Otherwise, you can only load balance over multiple connections.
Load balancing works great if you have many devices or have many separate things going on and you can distribute those over the wan links.
Isn’t my google wifi main router that main point?
My fear of just load balancing is the slew of devices I have I would have to setup rules for each. New ipad or something I would have to go in and add rules for it.
Currently my google wifi router app says I have 83 devices connected at the moment
Speedfusion takes the data you want to send, splits it between the WAN links, and then reassembles the packets on the speedfusion hub (or other peplink router running speedfusion) where it then comes to/from the world as if that split and reassembly never happened.
With load balancing, if you have multiple things going on, sending an email while streaming video while uploading a file while downloading a software update, a load balancer can balance those separate tasks and send some of them out WAN1 and others out WAN2. The responses will then come back through either WAN1 or WAN2 to each task.
But if you want to do one thing, such as sending a single email, it’s often not splittable without speedfusion. So if you ware waiting for one photo to upload, with a load balancer it will only use WAN 1 or WAN 2. Speedfusion can split the single browser or email client transaction, split the packets over WAN1 and WAN2, so that single transaction will utilize both WANs.
You might be fine with load balancing since your connections are each quite fast.
Another application of speedfusion is for an unbreakable connection. With load balancing if one of the wans goes down, the current task may interrupt or require a manual retry depending on application. Then you may have to retry it and it will work over the other wan that is up.