Link Bonding on Balance 30 LTE

Hi all,
I have a Peplink Balance 30 LTE and would like to aggregate my WAN connection with a Cellular connection to have more bandwidth.
I am using SpeedFusion Cloud for that purpose.
my WAN bandwidth is roughly 35 Mpbs and cellular 5 Mbps.
When I able SpeedFusion and run the test I am getting less than 5 Mbps. I was expecting to get at least 37 Mbps.
my question is: Can I use Peplink 30 LTE and SpeedFusion Cloud to bond 2 links?
for your information, I do not have any PepVPN/SpeedFusion tunnel. as I have only one peplink device
Thank you

What type of connection is providing the 35Mbps?

There are a number of things that affect the end bandwidth availability. The first one is that SpeedFusion is a VPN bonding technology. VPN encapsulates traffic using additional headers added to all traffic sent, those headers consume bandwith.

The theoretical SpeedFusion Bonded Bandwidth calculation includes accounting for the overhead of the VPN headers at 19%, so (35-19%)+(5-19%)= (28.35+4.05) = 32Mbps this is the expected theoretical throughput when using similar links.

So you should be getting more than 5Mbps and this needs investigation.

Yes. How successful that is depends on the links, but you should be able to build a more reliable internet connection using bonding.

For your info you do have a SpeedFusion tunnel, its just that this is to the SpeedFusion Cloud rather than to another device (or to a hosted FusionHub).

First thing to do is use two tools to test your SpeedFusion connection. The first is to start the graphs, the 2nd is a SF speedtest.

Navigate to Status > SpeedFusion. Find your Cloud Connection and click the graph button. Then click the arrow button:

  • The graph page should open in a new tab - leave that for now we’ll come back to it.
  • The arrow button should open up a PepVPN details window showing your available links.
  • Click the show remote connections checkbox and then you get toggle buttons next to each WAN.
  • Run a 20 sec TCP upload speedtest.
  • Run another with just one connection enabled, then another with the other connection enabled by itself.
  • Then repeat for download.Screen grab the graphs and post here.

eg here is my set of tests against a SFC in Amsterdam (I’m in the UK).

These graphs take a bit of interpretation. Mine shows me that although my upload bandwidth is bonding well, download is not working as well. Combined download bandwidth is around 100Mbps whereas separately WAN1 can do over 100MBps and WAN2 can do 70MBps. If I really wanted to chase down the underlying issue here I would look at why there is so much packet loss first and try and fix that. Packet loss on a link is the biggest cause of underperforming bandwidth when using SpeedFusion.

Grab your graph and share it and we’ll see if we can make some recommendations.

1 Like