Hello All,
I am new to peplink and formerly used a cradlepoint router for internet on my boat. I mainly use my router for onboard video streaming when at the dock and out on the water. My three WAN connections are as follows:
Shore based cable-modem WiFi - When at the dock, the router connects to a land based cable modem connection via WAN-over-Wifi
Visible Mobile Unlimited 4G LTE SIM (Peplink modem #1) - Visible mobile is a sub-company of Verizon wireless which has a very unique feature. Instead of providing a fixed monthly data use cap before slowdown, this service is constantly throttled down to 5Mbps, which is plenty for video streaming, and it does hit a wall where it slows down based on data usage. The only downside is that this data is deprioritized and can slow down to a crawl when the towers are congested.
Verizon Wireless Business 4G LTE SIM (Peplink modem #2) - This SIM is on my business cellular plan and provides 100Gigs of high-speed premium data at 25Mpbs, then is deprioritized data from 100-300Gigs.
Although the Visible connection works very well most of the time, on very busy weekends where there are a lot of boaters in the area, the cellular towers become conjested and I cannot stream video from this connection. How should I go about setting up the Max Transit so it will use the Visible mobile connection whenever the throughput is stable enough for streaming video, but can automatically switch to using the Verizon Business connection when the Visible connection degrades? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
@Kevin_Pearson I can’t help on your main question which seems quite tricky to resolve but will give you a heads up that since Visible more formally became part of Verizon they are starting to shut down SIMS that aren’t in phones. I’ve now had 2 of my 5 SIMs shutdown.
Good luck.
David
@Kevin_Pearson I thought of a potential solution. Others may have much more elegant solutions.
Set a download limit in the settings on the visible SIM and have it allow management traffic only once it reaches the 50GB download limit.
The put your shore connection and visible SIM as priority one connections with your verizon SIM on priority 2 with hot standby.
When your visible SIM runs out of data or drops service then the Verizon SIM will come in to play after 15 seconds or so. FWIW I’d consider having ATT or TMobile as my alternative as visible and Verizon use the same infrastructure.
You could also try a Speedfusion tunnel in hot fail but a number of streaming services (e.g. Netflix) won’t let you stream over a VPN tunnel.
Hope that helps.
David
Thanks for your input and idea, but I am not sure I explained the main functionality I am looking to occur very clearly. My visible SIM is the $30 plan which has no priority data…but unlimited 5MBs, but with constantly deprioritized status. When the Verizon network is congested, there is lots of buffering on streaming using visible sim due to deprioritization. During these times my Verizon business sim will work fine at “normal” priority.
How can I configure the WAN connections so the Peplink will detect the unstable Visible throughput, and switch to Verizon Business WAN. Stated simply…use the visible network when stable enough to stream, and only use Verizon when Visible wan becomes unsteady. Not sure if this can be detected by throughput, TTL, or some other means.
I did read that services such as Netflix blocks VPN like speedfusion. I have setup a Fusionhub Solo VMWare virtual machine at my office on a fast, stable, symmetric connection. Can you accomplish the same hot-fail tunneling features you describe using this Fusionhub tunnel in the same fashion as a Speedfusion tunnel?
@Kevin_Pearson I’ve never found a way to identify and force a poor performing connection offline so that it will use a better connection. The latest DWB in 8.3 might help you do that. You need to use an 8.3 beta firmware to get the new DWB (currently RC6). Set up a dedicated outbound rule for your video traffic and try your shore connection as P1 and both Visible and Verizon as P2.
I’ve not tried using a FusionHub but I do use a Speedfusion VPN tunnel between 2 peplink devices in similar situations. Theoretically a FusionHub should work as Netflix or others would see a termination at an IP not associated with larger scale VPN.
David