We have a customer that will be live streaming from remote locations. We are looking into several bonding solutions to achieve there goal of 10Mb up so they can stream 3 shows while they are at these remote venues. We were looking at the MAX-HD4-LTE-US-T.
Just a couple questions
Do you have any suggestions on systems that would allow us to bond 6 or more 4G USB devices?
Can you bond the 4G solutions with multiple WAN connections if they have them available?
We are looking for greater bandwidth but also need constant connectivity while they stream.
@MartinLangmaid has written a few articles about live streaming
One can be found here
From our experience, if you can get your require bandwidth from one SIM card, use SpeedFusion hot failover to give you the reliability and zero packet loss. The WAN soothing feature is also great for uploading video streams.
Bonding and failover between 3G, 4G, ADSL, Fibre and Satellite is possible but its recommended to only bond connections of similar characteristics (speed, latency etc)
However it is fine to use SpeedFusion hot fail over between different types of connections
I have done quite a lot of HD video streaming over SpeedFusion using cellular and have three key pieces of advice.
All Cellular providers overstate the bandwidth availability on their networks. I’ve bonded cellular on buses, in power stations, on farms, yachts, construction sites, movie sets and at live events in multiple continents and in each case there was never as much ‘real’ bandwidth available as you would expect.
By real I mean you can run a speedtest on a smartphone and get 20Mbps, but run a speedtest on two different smartphones at the same time and guess what - more often than not you get 20Mbps of bandwidth shared between the smartphones… see this post Peplink EU Distributor | Frontier BV | Connectiviteitspecialist
Using cellular for anything at live events with 1000’s of spectators (and so 1000’s of smartphones all trying to connect to the tower) very rarely works at all. Use satellite in highly populated venues if you need easy guaranteed bandwidth. Or put the cellular router outside of the venue nearer the tower (I did one event with the cellular modems running on batteries 4KM away and then used P2P wifi to get the bandwidth from this underused tower back to the venue).
If you’re bonding cellular and another form of connectivity (ie FTTC, DSL etc) try and match the latency of the WANs as closely as possible, and if they are very different and likely to fail, use video encoders / decoders that facilitate variable bit rates and extended buffers to compensate for jitter. WAN Smoothing is very very clever and works a treat for HD video over SpeedFusion but the more you use it the more underlying bandwidth you need…
In answer to your questions. Don’t use USB dongles. You’ll get better results with the MAX range of products and their inbuilt cellular modems combined with high gain external antennas I have deployed a MAX HD4 with 2 x MAX BR1s on its WAN ports before BUT that was for scenarios where the customer wanted 3 concurrent LTE connections from 4 mobile network operators (6 x 2 SIM slots = 12 SIMs, 3 SIMS from each operator). This was to guarantee coverage on vehicles that roamed heavily.
The sweet spot for most MNOs when it comes to maximum available bandwidth from one provider / tower is 2-3 active WANs bonded - and even then you can find that you get no more bandwidth bonding two connections than just using one if the MNO’s tower has limited back-haul bandwidth.
I’ve seen cellular towers connected back to the operators core network with 15Mbps microwave links and even some that used satellite as the back-haul in rural locations.
Just because you get 5 bars on 4G doesn’t mean you’ll get 4G speeds or latency characteristics - its all down to the operators network.
Bonding 4G and nearly any fibre fixed line product works great - remember, generally the lower the underlying latency the more throughput you’ll have available, I wouldn’t use DSL unless I really had to due to its contention ratios - which ultimately leads to variable bandwidth availability and jitter as well as its higher latency characteristics.
And finally, use Fusionhub hosted on a cloud based platform with a POP local to where you streaming from (ie in the same country) to reduce the underlying SpeedFusion tunnel(s) latency and so increasing throughput for your streams.
Not much II would add really. The receive bufffer can certainly help when WAN links are messy and need that little pocket of buffer to make the transmission more reliable. As a technique that doesn’t need any additional hardware (like a specialist video encoder/decoder) its very powerful.
LTE-A has made a massive difference to the success of bonding over cellular. Not just because of additional bandwidth potentially (and not always) available over it, but also because of the increased RF channel widths / frequencies available. I personally wouldn’t bond cellular for anything important now with non LTE-A devices.