Disable Slow Links

Balance 30. We have metered internet (satellite). When we hit the data cap for the month, the service is not cutoff, the bandwidth is simply throttled back to very slow speeds for that WAN link. I wish we actually would get cut off because then the peplink would detect a dead link and fail over. But the link is still up (health check is positive), and traffic continues to route through the slowed link.

We really want the link disabled when this happens. I am aware of the Bandwidth Allowance Monitor. It’s great, but doesn’t perfectly catch when the monthly cap is reached. I’m also aware of the Outbound Policy rules such as Overflow and the others.

What I really would like is a rule that simply disables a WAN link if it falls below a certain speed (throughput). I know that the Overflow algorithm will detect when the pipe is saturated, but that’s different from detecting low throughput.

I’ve been through the new settings in the 6.3 firmware and not seeing anything that fits the bill. We can live with the Bandwidth Allowance Monitor as a solution, but I’m just wondering if there is a better way. It would seem that slow link detection would be a popular feature. thanx.

Hi,

Bandwidth Allowance Monitor is the right solution for you.

  1. Make sure you choose the actual “Start Day”.

  2. For “Monthly Allowance”, you may set to 950MB if your quota limit is 1GB. This is due different protocol overhead and conversion, usage reported on Balance router may not match with usage reported on ISP side.

Hope this help.

+1 Great idea!

(And then enables it when it is working properly again!)

TK, thank you for the confirmation that the BAM feature is the way to go.

Separately, as Edward underscored, I’d like to make a feature request that being able to set a speed threshold cutoff would be advantageous in a variety of circumstances beyond dealing with data caps.

jim

Hi,

Real time monitoring the available WAN speed is a challenge task. Usually available WAN speed only can be confirm when you perform speed test by downloading and uploading a data file. This will actually congest the WAN link and generate extra bandwidth usage compare to real data traffics.

Let’ open this to others and consider the feasibility.

Thank You

Hi sitloongs

Thanks for your reply, and for confirming that you will open the suggestion to discussion! Great news. :slight_smile:

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my ISP’s wireless connections are extremely ‘iffy’, and at times slow to an absolute crawl.

However, because they don’t actually stop / fail completely, the signal is not given for the backup LTE connection to kick in, so this feature would be a godsend for me.

Edward

That makes sense. Once I started looking for the feature I was rather surprised it wasn’t there. But your point is well made. How would the balance know the difference between light/no traffic, and a slowed link… w/o running periodic forced downloads as a reference? Which in itself can be problematic.

I suppose this feature could be implemented with an algorithm that uses time and **relative speed **as factors. Something along the lines of: if avg speed drops by x % for y amount of time, excluding 0% traffic, then disable link.

Hmmm. No, that likely wouldn’t work. You’d probably get false positives during lulls, plus how would the balance know when to re-enable the link?

Not an easy one. ;>

Does your ISP’s throttle affect latency at all or just throughput?

It’s satellite internet, so there is so much latency baked into the cake (45K round trip = 3/4 sec delay) that I don’t imagine they do anything more than throttle the speed.