Don’t know wether this is the right place to ask but please move this thread if necessary!
We sometimes run into the issue that when arriving onsite we don’t get the requested “open/unblocked/firewall-free” lan access to the internet, which combined with bad cell reception leads to problems obviously.
Is there a recommended site / provider for some sort of web speed test that show wether or not our peplink balance should be able to stream properly or not? Ideally we’d request a screenshot of the site from our clients so we don’t have to do that by ourselfs onsite prior to events etc. speedest.net doesn’t seem to guarantee working internet via the peplink balance.
You have a bunch of questions in this - let’s unpick them.
Onsite firewall / traffic shaping / application blocking - how to detect and mitigate
Accurate speed testing of available links.
what to do when your out of band management is over poor cellular connectivity
On site firewalls - these can be a real pain the ass. Especially those with captive portals. Often the site owner has no idea about how anything is configured. My get out of jail config when I ship a device is to set up a SpeedFusion tunnel to a hosted FusionHub that has its data port set to 443 (instead of 4500). Since 443 (https) traffic is very rarely blocked by onsite filters this will often give me remote access when otherwise the VPN will get blocked. Otherwise getting your wifi WAN mac address whitelisted at the venue and preconfiguring a wifi WAN SSID profile can really help.
Speedtests - use WAN analysis between the WANs and a hosted Fusionhub to do accurate per WAN speed tests. Use the inbuilt SPeedFusion VPN speedtest tool to see what is available over the tunnel. If you want to use online tools, I like https://www.nperf.com/ for the detail it provides. I actually also like speedtest.net’s video stream test tool as that helps check if video streaming is allowed too :
OOB Management Tricks - I always ship devices set to connect to a known SSID and password. Then if the device has issues on site I ask someone there to turn on their smartphone hotspot with that SSID and password set so the Peplink device will connect and I can get remote access to it.
We also always ship Peplink devices with a global roaming SIM in slot B so we can get remote access wherever it gets powered up.
@MartinLangmaidMartinLangmaid, I’m curious as to what you like about nperf as a speed test versus something that tests latency under load. Nperf seems to test latency after download and upload testing, not concurrently. Whereas speedtest.net shows you ping latency in real-time under load. I.e., you can get an idea of bufferbloat.
