Hello, my name is Pedro and I’m from Brazil.
I own a couple of MAX700 and a Balance 210. I consider my self a very “hardcore” Speedfusion user. I use it all the time to bond 3G connections and provide a good pipe for HD video streaming. I developed a backpack to stream live video to TV channels, it uses TCP connections, and Peplink is my chosen hardware to do 3G bonding. Among my clients are ESPN Brazil. This is a reel, showing a little better what my work is: http://youtu.be/aoPNjvEESUA
I’ve been using Peplink products and Speedfusion for over 8 months now, and I came across a lot of conclusions that could help the Peplink engineers to improve the system.
First of all, I want to make it clear that the system works very decently when fine tuned, but there’s a lack of features that would help a lot.
Connection bonding is all about latency and stability. Since data is split in multiple channels, if one channel goes bad or unstable, all the rest is affected immediately. This is not exclusive to Speedfusion, previously I bought other bonding systems and came across the same “issue”. During my operations I must always keep an eye to the Speedfusion status, to see it any channel goes bad, I can spot a bad channel simply by looking at the Latency.
Let’s say if USB 1 to USB 3 are keeping a average latency of 100 or less, it’s all okay, but if one of the 3 USB modems goes bad, and latency grows over 700ms all the rest is affected, and my streaming simply stops or gets really choppy.
My workaround to this issue is a manual one, I keep an eye to the latency, if one goes bad I simply remove the bad USB from the hardware or I change it to a lower priority on Dashboard, this removes it from speedfusion bonding and everything goes well again.
**The solution I would suggest to improve the system would be a “flag” system, something that could detect a growing latency and flag or remove that particular USB modem from the bonding.
**- In Peplink advertisements it’s told that the product can bond EDGE, 3G, 4G, etc. But as a matter of fact, EDGE is just too slow for speedfusion. If I plug a USB modem that is connected to a EDGE network, among other 3G or 4G modems, I would be only compromising my Speedfusion tunnels.
So, again, I always have to keep an eye to see if any modem is operating under EDGE.
**I think it’s really important to have the option to force a particular USB modem to only 3G or only 4G, this way I would never have to worry again about a particular modem switching automatically to EDGE and killing my Speedfusion connection.
**Overall I do think it’s a great system and I’m happy with it, but somethings must be improved. Speedfusion is a great feature, and its a very important part of my work. I’m available to help Peplink engineers to make it better.
Thank you.
First of all, thanks for your support. I am sure your valuable feedback will give us some ideas for improvement.
We do agree that the EDGE connection is slow but for some places, this might be the best connection available. Thus bonding the EDGE connections will help them to breakthrough the bandwidth limitation.
We are not able to force the connection to only 3G or 4G with USB dongle but with our embedded cellular modem, we are able to do so as per below screenshot.
Hi Pedro, your feedback is well received and agreed. You can be assured that we are taking your comments very seriously and will work out solutions for them. We will get in touch soon. Thank you again for taking the time to let us know!
Hello Stanley,
Unfortunately MAX700 with embedded modems is not an option to me. LTE in Brazil will work on different frequency than in US. besides that, I’m always travelling abroad for events, and it’s good to be able to simply plug a different dongle every time. Is it impossible to force 3g or 4g on USB dongles? any workaround you might think of?
How about the “Flaging” system I was talking about? how you guys fell about that?
Thank you again.
If you could provide the exact brand and model of the USB dongle, and hook it up for us to do some testing (through Remote Assistance), we may investigate further about the 3G/4G only support :D. Since every modem may require different method to configure, or even not supporting such feature, we cannot support this generally for all modems.
Hello Steve,
I’m glad to know that you could work on it. I need this feature for the near future, LTE is hitting Brazil, it will be available on april 2013. The USB modem chosen for most carriers is the “Huawei E392”, but for now I don’t have it yet.
3G is really unstable in Brazil, and I hope that when 4G LTE arrives everything will be better, for this matter this feature is really important, once 4G is here, will be better having a 4G with low signal than a strong 3G signal, so would be very important to force 4G and prevent it from changing automatically to 3G.
I’m in contact with Keith, and as soon as I get my hands on a “Huawei E392” I will enable remote assistance for you.
