How does my Balance One (Core) behave without a Speedfusion license?

I have a Balance One Core and am using the two WAN ports with two different internet providers. It seems to work great (I get notified when an internet provider goes down, comes back up, and no one seems to notice.) I do not have a Speedfusion license.

I watched the Speedfusion demo video (https://www.peplink.com/technology/speedfusion-bonding-technology/) where one video conference failed and the Speedfusion kept going.

A couple of basic questions - does my balance one router use both WAN connections at the same time? Or is it a failover thing - where only one is used at at time? Without the license, would the demo conference call fail? Is the license a one time purchase and how much in general ($1000 ish?)

The bottom line is, what happens to my router with the Speedfusion license.

Thanks!

dave

If I’m understanding things correctly, the Speedfusion only relates to two Peplink routers connected to each other. The first question still remains - are both WAN ports always active and in use?

Hi @dnasralla
Welcome to the community!

It sounds like you are currently using load balancing across your two internet connections.
This works great and with a lot of applications, you won’t notice it if an internet connection goes down e.g. email. When you will notice an internet connection go down is if you where on a conference call and your call was going over WAN 1 and that internet connection failed, your conference call would drop and you would need to rejoin which would happen over WAN 2 (without you changing any settings on the Balance). If you were using SpeedFusion, the call would have moved to WAN 2 without dropping or you even noticing!

If you want to know if both WANs have been used, go to the states page and have a look at your usage reports. If you are using load balancing, I would expect you to be using a similar amount of data over each WAN.

SpeedFusion is a VPN that happens between two Peplink devices. Currently we have three methods of using SpeedFusion

  1. Peplink Hardware - Peplink Hardware for example your Balance ONE connected to another Balance in a data centre or head office
  2. Peplink Hardware - Peplink Software for example your Balance ONE connected to FusionHub in a data centre e.g. AWS
  3. Peplink Hardware - SpeedFusion Cloud for example your Balance ONE connected to our SpeedFusion Cloud

The third option is the easiest and quickest way for you to set up SpeedFusion and test it out!
Please have a look at this post SpeedFusion Cloud Instructions - Safeguarding Your Connectivity

Once this is set up, you can create outbound policies and VLAN to separate your traffic to continue accessing the internet via load balancing or over SpeedFusion. This is great if have certain traffic you want routed over SpeedFusion e.g. conference call but you want the rest of the locations traffic to just load balance on the internet.

Hope this helps!

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Ok. That is very helpful. If I understand correctly, the Speedfusion makes the external connection, like to a the conference call, look like a single IP address which will not change based on which WAN connection my router is using. This makes sense to me. Thanks for your clear explanation!

Dave Nasralla

Hi Dave @dnasralla
SpeedFusion connects you to another device/service which then presents your traffic to the internet regardless of which route it took.
This means your traffic is split into multiple routes to your single reliable point of entry to the internet so if one of your routes to access the internet fails your are still connected via the same public IP address

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That’s what I was thinking - but you said it more clearly.
Thanks for all the explanations!

dave

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