I’m using a Balance 20 with Cox cable as my primary internet connection on WAN1. I have T-Mobile Home Internet (TMHI) connected to WAN2 for use primarily as a backup.
The Cox connection is generally pretty stable (although it has failed a few times), but the speed on the TMHI connection varies a lot. When the TMHI connection goes slow, all the devices that are using that connection are very slow and sometimes unusable. You can usually ping thru WAN2 (the connection does not appear dead), but web browsing becomes painful.
How can I configure things to automatically route traffic to WAN1 if WAN2 slows down too much?
Well, if the slow connection that causes you pain is accompanied by an increase in latency you can change the health check parameters from the default. One of our customers has a similar situation and has reduced the Timeout parameter well below the default, as shown below. We’re told this solved the problem for them – after a bit of experimentation. In this case once ping responses exceed 600ms the subject WAN will be marked as down.
One thing you may also consider: The Balance 20 is a fine router but its maximum throughput is well below what you are likely to attain with your Cox and TMHI connections. Might be time to consider a faster device.
Thanks, I’d forgotten about the health check settings. I’ll try playing with those and see if it helps. Does the router log an event if the timeout is exceeded?
I know the Balance 20 is not the fastest, but bandwidth is not really a problem. According to the logs, I’m nowhere close to the 600 mbps max throughput. I use faster Peplink routers at work, but the Balance 20 is fine for home. Most of my work is done via command line, so I don’t use much bandwidth. I grew up using 300 baud dialup connections to Unix servers, so this is more than enough for me.
Hi @jeff . Yes, when the WAN goes down to health check failure the event will be recorded in the log seen at Status → Event Log.
B20: I’m not denigrating your router. I just meant to point out that the specs of this device show that its stateful firewall limitation is 150mb/sec, not 600. My experience is that that figure may be just a bit optimistic.
I’ve owned or managed 12+ B20 routers over the years and I’ve noticed that some of the older hardware versions can have problems, especially with newer firmware. But they seem to have increased the horsepower a bit on HW6+ versions. Right now I have three newer B20s with dual-WAN connections cross-linked with VPNs between my two homes and my office. My primary concern for this network is a dependable connection, not max throughput. I have other networks with busy servers that are optimized for throughput and use more robust routers.
