Live Event Streaming Setup

Hi there,

I need to stream a live meeting to youtube at a venue where there is no wired LAN with internet available so we need to go 4g LTE

Setup:
Balance 380
3x TP-link AC750 4G LTE Router
3x Vodafone 4G plan with 6 Gb each local bandwidth about 4 Mbps upload per connection.

What are the best settings for

  1. Spread the usage of the 3 plans to stay under max. Gb per sim
  2. Aggregate speed of the 3 connections to get a stable higher bandwidth connection.
    Streamtime will be 3x one hour, 720p@30fps

Thanks,
Niek

Hi Niek,

Just a question, are you aware that just the Peplink Balance 380 is not enough for bandwidth bonding?
SpeedFusion is a VPN technology, which means you will have to set up a VPN tunnel to another Peplink device, for example in a data center or at your main office.

Bonding 3 SIM-cards of the same provider in a SpeedFusion VPN tunnel does not give great results.
The cellular tower sees the SpeedFusion VPN tunnel as one data session, thus dividing the bandwidth you get over the 3 SIM-cards.
If you would normally get 4 Mbps on one SIM-card, you will get around 1,33 Mbps per SIM-card while bonding.
We’ve also seen cases where only one SIM-card would get full speed, and the other SIM-cards would get nearly 0 bandwidth.

For SpeedFusion to be viable with one provider, you will need to use a different frequency on each SIM-card.
Your user name sounds Dutch to me, so I will be giving Vodafone NL as an example.
Vodafone NL supports 3 LTE frequencies (800 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2600 MHz), but you can never be really sure if all frequencies have a good signal in the area you’re going to be streaming.

I would suggest using KPN, Vodafone and T-Mobile together, this will give you much better results.
The company I work for supplies SIM-cards that can work with multiple providers, we can supply you with SIM-cards with a different provider on each SIM-card.
We use these SIM-cards for SpeedFusion bonding all the time, mainly in the broadcasting and rivercruise industries.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can contact me on [email protected].

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Thkz, Joey,

I will send you an email.

Niek

Could you elaborate on this?

Specifically, how does the tower determine that the two or more connections that make up the VPN tunnel are joint and thus splitting the bandwidth?

Does the same issue apply if the two connections are not part of a SpeedFusion VPN but rather are each a component of a balancing regime (say, equal priority set for the appropriate outbound rule)?

Hi,

I can’t tell you much about why it works like this.
One of the local network operators has confirmed it to us and the local Peplink distributor though.
We had a project with their event division, so we got in touch with some technical people there.
They told us it has to do with how the cells on the cellular towers work, but they wouldn’t tell us much more than that.

Loadbalancing has the same issue when you use two or more SIM cards of the same provider, but you won’t see that with a Speedtest since it only uses one session.
I always urge people to use multiple providers when using multiple SIM cards, not just for the bandwidth, but also for the redundancy.

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Intriguing! :grinning:

With two radios on a device (e.g., a HD2) there’ll be different identifier sets (IMSI, ICCID, MTN, MEID and IMEI) for the two, and I wonder what determines that they are not two separate devices (e.g., two people each with their own phone or mifi)?

Particularly if there is no bonding.

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You may refer to the page 10 of the document below for better understanding.

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I appreciate the documentation.

Running through a scenario:
Tower capacity (backhaul or RF): 100 Mbps
Assume the number of (single-radio) devices: 10
Bandwidth per device (and radio): 100/10 = 10 Mbps

Assume one of the devices is an HD2 with two radios, and the second is turned on (be it SpeedFusion or simply load balancing):
Then the number of radios: 11
Bandwidth per radio: 100/11 = 9.1 Mbps, a reduction of 9% per radio.

In other words - when there are a significant # of radios communicating with the tower, the marginal addition of another radio has a relatively small influence on the bandwidth available per radio.

However, I understood Mr. van der Gaag to indicate that if one were to activate the second radio on a device (e.g., the HD2) the bandwidth per radio on that device would fall by 50% (fairly) independently of how many other radios were concurrently engaged with the tower.

I may have misunderstood him or the documentation.

Please advise.

Hi,

@Wouter was involved in the project I was talking about, he might be able to tell you some more.

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Dear Zegor,

Its a combination of tower and frequency.

Example 1:

Both simcards from the same ISP when operating on band 20 800MHZ. They will share the Bandwith cap on the frequency.

Example 2: Using both simcards same ISP Band 20 800 MHZ (modem 1) Band 3 1800MHZ (modem 2). Now the modems are each using a different frequency from the tower and thus leaving open 2 Lines of bandwith avaible. (this wont work with LTEA modems as they already combine these 2 FREQ bij default)

Example 3: Using 2 different ISP’s will give you more coverage and more bandwith as you are on a different SUB FREQ and tower. This would be the most desirable situation.

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Would using 2 or more different ISP’s when upstreaming video have different latencies? And if so degrading video quality at viewers end?

Dear Niek,

Firmware 7.1.0 has a new buffer feature in speedfusion. Peplink also has other features like latency cutoff ect.
If configured well the image should be smooth. But keep in mind for the best results you also need good Simcards and antennas. The combination good simcards/Antennas with a pepwave router should do the trick and give you an amazing user experience.

2 Likes

This is a bit of a topic drift, but anyway:

My takeaway from the above is

  1. Towers are capacity constrained, and adding an additional radio (e.g., a second SIM card to an HD2) on the same frequency band changes the per-radio capacity available at any one particular point in time. The capacity constraint may be the result of frequency saturation (many users for a given band), backhaul capacity constraints and possibly other limitations. The approximate effect of adding an additional radio is then to reduce the per-radio available bandwidth from C/N to C/(N+1) where C is the total capacity of the tower on the particular band and N is the number of radios requiring access. If the tower is designed for only a few users then the reduction may be significant.

  2. Strategies for avoiding this effect in some cases are then essentially to ensure that the different radios are using different frequency bands, e.g. by employing more than one carrier, or by using the band selection option to distinguish the two radios within a single carrier deployment. If the backhaul is capacity-limited then there is precious little one can do, except ensure that the different radios connect to different towers (i.e., different carriers, at least in some cases (carriers do occasionally share towers and the backhaul)).

Using more than one band (or carrier) can itself be dicey, since some bands/carriers are better/have greater capacity than others (depending on the location) resulting in low bandwidth for the unlucky radio.

Fair summary?

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Yes. That tallies with my experience also.

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zegor i’m super thankful to you for that post! i appreciate a lot as i found some useful information there. i can see that you know these things so much more better than i do so was wondering if oyu don’t mind asking me questions? thanks alot!