Does bonding Cellular Modems with SpeedFusion actually increase your throughput?

Has anyone else noticed that when you try to bond cellular modems with a MOTG using a Speedfusion sever, the total throughput of all the modems is never able to exceed the throughput of a single modem? Sometimes it even makes the “bonded” throughput slower than one of the single modems?

Am I the only one who is having this problem?

Hello,

Are you using a different mix of Cellular providers? Appreciate if you could provide more detailed information. What are the speeds of the modems? What are the speeds with SF enabled.

The MOTG no longer supports SpeedFusion bonding, instead it supports hot fail-over and WAN Smoothing.

@Tim S,

Are you saying that the MAX-OTG-U4-SF doesn’t support bonding anymore? Just hot Fail-Over and WAN smoothing?

~WFF

@WFF, yes that is correct.

Was this previously available and then removed? That would be a little troubling… I was considering this hardware for purchase for bonding feature in particular and some product information is conflicting about this. For example, see the top of the triangle graphic here http://www.peplink.com/technology/pepvpn/ (currently lists max on the go as having bonding). Can you tell us when and why it was removed and if feature removal is something I should worry about if I decide to buy Peplink hardware?

We need to update that page, thanks for pointing this out. We removed the bonding feature because the Max OTG simply did not have enough hardware horsepower to do bonding effectively. Thanks.

this is like some horrible nightmare…
I just received (2) MOTG units this morning via UPS with the intention to use the SpeedFusion AND now I find this??

-WTF !?!?!?!?

its not just one website, its all over the place AND you still have re-sellers out there selling the MTOG with SpeedFusion…

what policy do you have in place for those that purchased these devices?
are they now just trash? -cause I get the feeling I’m not the only one on this train.
Fail over is great an all, but lets face it, 89% of us here are looking to increase bandwidth by combining cellular data connections.

The MOTG-U4 does increase available bandwidth because it supports up to 4 active USB modems and will spread the traffic out across all of them, providing a much better user experience. This is session-based load balancing whereas bonding is part of our SpeedFusion VPN technology and requires another SpeedFusion-enabled device on the other side of the tunnel. Thanks.

thanks for the quick reply, its def better than the attempts to reach tech support on the phone.

I’ll go ahead and remove that foot from my mouth now.

Can you recommend any means to test the load balancing?
working with (2) USB LTE sticks and not able to see any difference between having one or two plugged in.

Please refer to the following KB article that has instructions and a test tool you can download:
http://www.peplink.com/knowledgebase/speed-test-tool-for-combined-download-speed-in-multi-wan-environment/
Thanks.

feeling very honored by all the help, thank you.

So are simple speed test web sites not able to detect the difference?
On a Mac over here so can’t use your exe

ok, thanks for all the help. Its been a tough day of tough lessons…

Found an article that pin points my source of pain.
http://www.peplink.com/knowledgebase/combining-the-bandwidth-of-all-wan-links-3m-3m-6m/

The idea of getting these units was exactly as the title states in an effort of 3m+3m=6m
Sadly, that is not the case.
We were under the impression that the MOTG unit could be deployed to one person in a remote location and then use 2-4 USB 3G data sticks to improve internet connectivity.

Not necessarily to use a download manger to download files, but rather standard use of web, email, VOIP and video conferencing.

Looks like we were steered toward the wrong direction and will instead need to find a budget for another solution, maybe the balance units.

Sorry to say but i feel that i I have been fooled by Peplink.

I purchased de MAX-OTG-U4-SF, just to use the advertised “Speed Fusion Bandwith Bonding” and tried for months to increase bandwith:

  • Different Carriers
  • Different Modems
  • Different Providers
  • Ticktets, emails, remote sessions, etc…

On last email sent by peplink team, they said:

"If application is running in Tcp, you will need to have multiple Tcp sessions.

Engineering team is looking for a potential solution to achieve total bandwidth bonding with single Tcp session. But this need more development effort and time and will not happen in the upcoming release.

Sorry for any inconvenience cause thank you for your patient.

Regards,
TK"

And now they came and said: “We removed the bonding feature because the Max OTG simply did not have enough hardware horsepower to do bonding effectively. Thanks.”

It´s a shame…

Sincerely

Fábio

Hi Fábio,

Below is my feedback on 4 September 2014.

*Hi,

Feedback from engineering team as below:-

The SF bonding is working with:-

  1. Single UDP stream set to 10 or 11Mbps
  2. Two or more TCP stream

but not:
Single TCP stream

In other word, if your application is running in Udp then you will see the result of bandwidth bonding. If application is running in Tcp, you will need to have multiple Tcp sessions.

Engineering team is looking for a potential solution to achieve total bandwidth bonding with single Tcp session. But this need more development effort and time and will not happen in the upcoming release.

Sorry for any inconvenience cause thank you for your patient.

Regards,
TK
*
For your case, why you can’t see bonding result with single TCP stream? This is due to Flow control of TCP connection. Sender needs to wait for the ACK packet from the receiver for each packet it sent. This will degrade the performance when there was packet loss and high latency.

Fyi, we do recommend 3G networks for MOTG and position it for WAN Smoothing on August 2015. The reason was explained by Tim. So, your case is different with our announcement.

I really don´t care anymore. It´s allways my fault or provider fault or lte fault or Flow control fault.
As i said before, i tested with many links even with low latency links with no packet loss and the results are the same on single tcp connections.

I bought the max otg and the balance 210 to use on a single tcp and with lte/3g mixed links as advertised, but for me didn’t work.

regards
fabio

Hi fabio,

Please work with us on the ticket if you need further assistance. SpeedFusion performance is depending on WAN characteristic. We will see how we can improve there. Fyi, latest firmware version do have advanced SpeedFusion features which may help in your situation.

Thank you.

I don’t use your Speedfusion service for bonding anymore, but the BR1 is a fantastic cellular modem and works really well when paired with other bonding solutions. I think the problem is latency, when you try to bond connections with dissimilar latency (4G and DSL for instance), Speedfusion just doesn’t work very efficiently.

After years of using Peplink products, I still maintain the Peplink’s true competition is Cradlepoint; not companies like B3broadband.com, Mushroom Networks and TeraDek. When you compare a Peplink product to a Cradlepoint product, the advantages are obvious. When you stack Speedfusion against a true bonding solution, the advantage isn’t so obvious.