I’m new to the Peplink family, but it is doing great so far helping keep VoIP connections up and running in a small office.
I noticed that SIP is all being routed over WAN2, the slower ADSL 6/768k line. I have WAN1 and 2 both active.
Is this routing selected by the Peplink 20 by some logic or is it random?
A related question: is it advisable to configure WAN links with sub-maximum speeds in the settings page? For example, instead of setting the WAN2 as 6/768k in settings, setting it as 5/512k. Is this recommended or is the Peplink wise enough to understand the limitations of sold speeds vs actual?
I believe by default it routes based on latency. You’ll have to define a custom outbound policy and either force the sip over the faster link or set it to weighted and play with those values to get it to go where you want it to.
Which WAN is used for outbound connections is controlled by “Outbound Policy” under the Network tab. As already mentioned the default policy is “Least Latency” which picks the WAN with lowest latency. You can create protocol specific rules to override the default policy. For example create a rule matching SIP traffic using the priority algorithm to prioritize which WAN connection is used. You can also modify your default rule to use weighted policy making use of all WAN connections at the same time.
The default policy for outbound shows as HIGH APPLICATION AVAILABILITY. I don’t believe I’ve changed any settings here. I did receive an email a few days ago that WAN1 was down for a few minutes. I imagine that since the VOIP phones stuck around the link stayed with WAN2 since the outage? Or is it just a lower latency and the Peplink 20 knows to put VOIP on lowest latency WAN?
Also, any advice about this question? “A related question: is it advisable to configure WAN links with sub-maximum speeds in the settings page? For example, instead of setting the WAN2 as 6/768k in settings, setting it as 5/512k. Is this recommended or is the Peplink wise enough to understand the limitations of sold speeds vs actual?”
I don’t have a Balance 20 to look at here but the default outbound policy is usually set to “Auto” which does lowest latency routing. My guess is that you are using this configuration as the Balance doesn’t specifically route SIP out one specific WAN connection based on it’s service type. SIP default port is 5060 so it would take a custom configuration to route that out one specific WAN connection all the time.
Feel free to post a screenshot of your outbound policies and we can give them a once over.
The default is “high application availability” and that uses the latency based setting. To modify that behavior, you have to set the Outbound policy to “custom”. Once you do this you can configure the default behavior (weighted, persistence, enforced, lowest latency, etc) as well as specific networks, devices, protocols or even domain names to route out one specific WAN and only failover to the other when necessary.
When I click the little question mark next to the outbound policy setting it says this for my High application compatibility setting. I’d be curious what yours says.
High Application Compatibility - When this is selected, outbound traffic from the same LAN host will be routed to the same WAN connection regardless of its destination address and protocol. This will provide the highest compatibility to applications.
Same: “High Application Compatibility - When this is selected, outbound traffic from the same LAN host will be routed to the same WAN connection regardless of its destination address and protocol. This will provide the highest compatibility to applications.”
OK, so does your SIP traffic originate from a SBC or does each device connect the SIP streams directly to the SIP provider?
My thought here would be to enable the custom outbound policy and leave the default for persistence then create a custom rule for your sip traffic to use weighted and set the lower speed link to “0”. This would force that traffic out the primary WAN while still keeping failover. You can also enable “Terminate sessions on recovery” which will drop any connections over the failover link but in this case I wouldn’t do that since it’s voice related.
Fair enough. If anything it may be better to leave it like it is if the SIP traffic is the only thing using that WAN link when both are up. I would just make sure you have your QoS Application settings configured to set all supported VOIP protocols to high if that model supports it.
Outbound policy rules govern how all your traffic is load balanced/routed out through the Peplink. If you would like SIP to go out the fast WAN there are a couple ways you can set it up. You can create rules using the priority algorithm and input your VOIP phones IP and then choose WAN1. (Forces that VOIP Phone out WAN1 and will use WAN2 only when WAN1 fails).
Or if your WAN1 is comparably faster then then your WAN2 then I would set a rule using the priority algorithm to enforce all traffic out your fast WAN1. You will still get fail-over since WAN2 is next on the priority list in case WAN1 fails.
And to answer your questions about under-valuing the up/down speeds.
-I would set the up/down speeds for what your ISP is rated for for best optimization.
As you have QoS set for VOIP traffic to high. What this does is when you initiate a VOIP call that this type of traffic will take precedence over any other traffic. For example let’s say you make a VOIP call and a HTTP request to the internet at the exact same time. QoS takes a look on a packet level for these two requests and will prioritize the VOIP call over the HTTP request. Not necessarily which WAN to send it out on as this is governed by outbound policy rules.