Fushionhub vs SFC for greater throughput plus config questions

Product Discussion
1

I’m trying to make sure I understand this correctly, and what might be the best solution in our situation.

Our use case has changed since my last post, so we’re updating our configuration.

I own a live streaming company and we live stream events online.

Our previous configuration required 1 device connecting to a server to send the stream to. Recently, we introduced remote production. IE: The cameras send an SRT feed over the network to our production studio where we do the actual production (switching, audio adjustments, graphics, and then transcoding for the internet.)

A note on the SRT protocol. It’s designed specifically to deal with unstable networks and works quite well over the internet directly. Peplink and all of this is just backup. We’re after hot failover and VPN if possible to avoid opening firewall ports.

What I’m trying to accomplish is a hot fail over with LTE.

At the venue we generally have Ethernet and can plug in. We use a Max BR-1 for this.
On the studio side, we have a Balance 20x with a wan.

Both have LTE sim cards and generally the speed is okay. On the studio side, I’ve installed an external antenna to improve the link to the tower and that seems to have helped a lot.

Ideally, I’d like to connect these two sites over a VPN to avoid needing to open the firewall.

The last event we did, we attempted remote over the tunnel. we experienced a lot of lag and the latency was all over the place. I ended up pulling the Balance out at the studio and going directly to our WAN. More testing shows the speed is variable quite a bit.

Running some speed tests, there seems to be some variability in the speed. Sometimes we’ll see 30 down/7 up. Sometimes 30/30 It varies a bit and it doesn’t appear to be the cellular or wan side. Wan is consistently 100/50 minimum. Removing my computer here from the SFC config yields 109/128 on a speedtest. So Wan is solid.

So with that I’m curious if Fushionhub would help us by increasing our speed at the server end of the link. Or if we can somehow cut SFC cloud out, as I’m thinking that’s where the slowdown might be occurring.

Because I’m a little nervous about my explaination above. The primary goals are:

  • Redundant link between the Max and Balance (hot fail over)
  • Redundant link between the Max and our internet server for the final stream. (hot fail over)

Hopefully I explained correctly.

2

Its very likely that your LTE SIMs don’t allow for inbound routing (as most LTE uses CGNAT). So you’ll need a device in the middle that has a public IP so you can hotfailover to LTE on both devices.

Or if the fiber at the studio is solid then you could just do speedfusion direct from the BR1 (LTE and WAN) to the studio’s public IP (WAN only).

So long as both devices are in the same country that will likely give you the lowest latency.

Otherwise you can host your own Fusionhub (search here for vulr hosted fusionhub), or ask someone to host one for you. Many of us Peplink partners offer that as a service.

Latency cut off will be your friend when it comes to video streaming. be really aggressive with it to keep jitter down. Don’t do FEC in the speedfusion tunnel as SRT does that itself.

3

Thanks for the reply Martin.

It’s really appreciate. I guess now we’ve got a few decisions to make.

On one hand my internet is very stable here, but Murphy can be a, well you know.
On the other, I’m just not sure I’m ever going to get a stable enough LTE connection here, it’s a moderately rural area and I’m on the wrong side of the tower (I’m between the tower and a river, so there isn’t much over here, most of the antennas are pointing the other way towards town)

I understood that the carrier wasn’t going to allow inbound routing, wasn’t really going to give that a try at all. My goal was to keep in all on the VPN if I could. I’m familiar enough with Digital Ocean that I could spin up a fushionhub server pretty quickly and easily, I’m afraid I’m a bit more out of my wheelhouse in terms of configuring the rest of it.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

If I were to decide I just don’t want to deal with this, what would be the best way to contact you (as a partner, to enlist your services?)

Thanks again!

4

Maybe consider a Starlink connection?

There are loads of great videos showing how. See 5G stores here and my old one here.

I’ll PM you.