So I will need two peplink routers in order to accomplish channel bonding at the packet level and both of those will go in line before my google main mesh router? or one and a cloud service like you mentioned. If i want just normal load balancing then I can use a router with that built in
You would probably want to do speedfusion between one balance router and a cloud instance of fusionhub. Big companies do speedfusion between multiple balance routers. The fusionhub is like a virtual balance router in the cloud.
what happens if fusionhub goes down? do I lose internet entirely
You can choose what happens in that event.
I guess my idea is becoming way over my head. I thought pepwave had a router than would handle two incoming connections and treat them as one on the output with nothign else needed so that output would cat 6 wire into my google main router and no double nat either
wan1 and wan2------------- Peplink router-------google main mesh router------rest of system
That diagram would allow for load balancing but i guess not channel bonding on the packet level
Itâs easy to load balance with less resources committed to doing it.
Itâs harder if you want to actually treat multiple wans as one in terms of what a single computer/application sees.
The fact that you have two quite fast connections makes it potentially expensive at this point if you want to actually bond them.
You might start by load balancing and see if you need more. (for example, how reliable is your gigabit connection gong to be? I donât know if itâs worth spending $$$$ if it only has one outage a year. But if it has one outage a week or one outage a day, speedfusion would look a lot more important for you.)
1 Like
My gig connection has gone down two times since sunday for 4 hours oor longer. Had to tether my phone and bridge the connection to the rest of the system. I do not pay for the internet connections. My company does so that is why this channel bonding is so attractive. Also having a systems that is using two connections as one big one sounds good to me and would really make me happy. Actually they are only paying for the fiber connection. The gig service is included in my hoa dues. I cant not not pay them. So its either keep paying the hoa for nothing or pay them and take advantage of the community gig service that comes with those payments. No backing or opting out.
So in summary could you or anyone diagram it out or very explicitly describe the order in which I would need to have devices to achieve true channel bonding. (e.g) my post a few up
I think I should step aside at this point and let some other people put in their advice as I do not yet have the budget for peplink gear that can bond at these speeds first hand ⌠hopefully someday! Right now Iâm really hopeful to get 100 mbps connections to work with which would be great! (others here are also much better at diagraming things like this than I am!)
As a final thought, it wouldnât hurt for you to contact your local peplink dealer and see what they would quote you for equipment to achieve this. I donât think they would mind taking a few minutes to quote you some pricing.
1 Like
You really have been wonderful. Please dont totally step aside. Bring your input that hopefully others may have for my situation. Thank you so very much
SO to keep the thread updated I have since learned now the speedfusion bonding is a needed service in order to combine my two internet connections into one big pipe. Is there anyone that can provide any drawing or schematic of what my system would look like. I am wanting to combine the full download power of my cable provider which is 1 gig/40 up and my fiber to home connection which is 100 down/ 100 up. Im wanting the fiber connection to essentially add its 100 download and 100 upload power to my cables 1gig down/40 up
You donât necessarily need speedfusion.
A plain old Peplink Balance One like Iâm using will combine several internet services (I have 3: Fiber and Cable and a backup MiFi cellular device). For most purposes, it âjust worksâ.
The thing that you canât do with this is some types of INBOUND load balancing. For example, suppose Iâm running a web server. Because of the way the web works, this has to appear on a single public IP address, which has to be assocaited with one of my physical connections. If that IP address is on my fiber connection, and my fiber goes down, thereâs no way for incoming connections to magically use the Cable modem instead.
But most people arenât running servers.
Can you say more about your use case?
1 Like
Certainly. I have 3 servers that I access from outside the network daily. 2 nas servers and a linux bare bones build that runs free nas. Now the problem with the balance one is that I have a gig line as one of the two. The other is 100 sothe balance one doesnt have the throughput I would need in the end. Also my mesh system must be the dhcp handler and with the servers I cannot have a double nat. Wouldnât want a double night I should say. I could create an openvpn to access them but still
You donât want to use Speedfusion Bonding for all traffic at full line speeds as youâll have to pay the bandwidth costs for ingress / egress at the remote / Fusionhub end.
Load balancing will be fine for you and most of your high bandwidth traffic (like the CCTV cameras) and provide session level failover between WAN links.
Just use speedfusion for real-time traffic that is sensitive to packet loss / latency variation (like voip), and potentially to simplify inbound access to servers / services over multiple WANs.
Look at the Balance Two, or if you want to future proof and add in 5G when it is available the SDX.
1 Like
I have been struggling with understanding things as well and what I have concluded is as follows:
When you combine multiple little pies into a big pipe, the router chops things up on one end, shoves the resulting mush through the pipes and then re-assembles it on the other end to give you back the original. As a result you need two routers to make an effective link - one to chop and the other to glue things back together.
There are services available that act as the second router but of course they have a business to run and they charge you money. This charge is likely (unsure here) broken down into two sections. One charge will be to provide the (virtual) router (they might have a traffic charge as well as the base charge) and the other charge will be for the connectivity that they provide to the public internet that will be used to move your data to the world.
In a standard âhead office / remote officeâ kind of a situation this is not a big deal. Head office already has the connectivity to the world and they just add a counterpart to your speed fusion router (I do not know if one router can handle many speed fusion links or if you need one for each link). In any case, the incremental cost is basically irrelevant.
For an individual user such as myself, I would have to avail myself of a service to provide the second speedfusion link and that charge will quickly add up.
It quickly becomes a question of âwhat is your time worthâ ⌠only you can answer that.
Another way to look at it, your 80 some devices do not need a single link, they need to transfer their data but each device has itâs one bucket of data it sends. If your router distributes the buckets over your available internet feeds it gets the job done just as well. Speedfusion will only help if you send a single data stream that is very large.
Speedfusion also produces a more robust connection but will a hickup cost you lots of money or is it just an inconvenience.
In any case, if one of your links goes down, you are no longer getting anything from speed fusion.
In my case it is pretty clear that the cost would well exceed any benefit and that simply running two ISP feeds into the router would give me redundancy against a failed connection at a tiny fraction of the cost.
One other important thing - speedfusion might be more important if you are heavily into video conferencing or voice over IP.
Hope that helps a little bit.
Yes
Yes, a virtual machine hosting charge and a bandwidth allowance / charge.
All Peplink routers can connect to at least two remote peers (or devices). Those bigger devices like the balance which are used in the core or hub of corporate networks can support thousands of remote peers / devices. When you look at the device specification look for the number of remote peers.
Not really. A free fusionhub solo licensed virtual appliance running on Vultr.com will cost you $5 USD a month for 1TB of bandwidth.
Agreed.
Yes, but also if your links suck and have packetloss and jitter, then SpeedFusion can compensate for that and make things like VoIP and video conferencing work over those unreliable links reliable.
Not true. Speedfusion can still help on a single WAN. It can duplicate traffic and add forward error correction which can fix some packet loss situations.
1 Like
Could you elaborate on this $5 deal for a TB ? I see they provide various services including load balancing but I see nothing related to speed fusion.
They just provide hosting services. You have to manually install FusionHub on their infrastructure. I made a guide here.
The video is old. It says the solo license has a 100mb limit, it doesnât anymore.
1 Like
Never mind, I worked it out
I was not aware of this and it sounds like an excellent arrangement. I will look into it further.
Thanks!
If thatâs true, that would be a problem, as the Peplink Balance really needs to be doing NAT/DHCP for it all to work well. Are you sure your mesh system canât just act in bridge mode?
1 Like