Peplink Balance 380 - Gigabit WAN, only pulling 290x290

I have a gigabit circuit on my WAN plugged directly into my Peplink Balance 380 (HW.5, FW 6.2.2 build 3362). If I run speedtest, I pull about 290x290. If I plug into my laptop (Macbook Pro 13" 2012 model w/ ethernet) it pulls a 910x910.

My immediate thought is that I’m having an MTU issue, but testing 1440, 1500, 1530, and 1580 I can’t seem to pull any faster than the 290x290. I’ve also noticed that the CPU seems to spike all the way to 100% very consistently when running speedtest to the point that the CLI is non-responsive until it’s complete.

Any thoughts?

Please and thank you!

Edit: I’ve also made sure that my Upload/Download bandwidth is set to 1 Gbps, not 300x300; Also, auto MTU is pulling 1500

This is the maximum router throughput for Balance 380 Hw5. You can achieve 900Mbps if you are using Balance 380 Hw6.

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Thank you for your response.

I just want to be clear here on my side: even though everything is marketed as 1 Gbps of throughput*****, it’s only actually about 200 Mbps? That is incredibly shady! How can you sell a product as gigabit because of it’s technical port speed capability rather than actual usable throughput?

Between this and Peplink dropping support for Speedfusion on the Pepwave Max, I cannot imagine investing any more time or resources into a group that hides any semblance of real data or information behind multiple layers of marketing garbage.

Your Balance 380 HW5 is marketed as having 200 Mbps and you mentioned you were pulling 290 so it is actually outperforming the rated spec. We appreciate your support of our products!

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Hi there. Is this still the case or is the 380 WAN interfaces now capable of higher speeds?

@msifakis

This is depend the the hardware revision for the B380. Start with B380 HW6, you should able to get around 1GB Stateful firewall throughput. Detail info please refer to the URL below :kissing_heart:

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Which revision do I have? How can I tell?

Manos Sifakis (On the go)

customedialabs

@msifakis, you may check at Status > Device.

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I am so sad! My 380 is a HW5 and my 710 is a HW2 :frowning:

Now what!? Is there a way to trade up?

@msifakis

Please contact Peplink local partner for assistance. They should able to advice on that.
https://www.peplink.com/peplink-certified-partners/

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Hello … last week we upgraded a fibre circuit to 900mbs and the BPL-380 HW 6 FW 8.1.1 5006 didn’t give us more than 286mbs. ( a BT router on the same network cable gave us more than 1 gig )
Today we are upgrading another location to 900mbs and there is also a BPL-380 HW 6 FW 8.1.1 5006 at that site…
We have 7 units BPL-380 ( plus 2 spare standby units ) so we have more fibre upgrades about to happen.
I need some tech. advice please to sort out this miserable speed problem ( MTU was 1440 and is now AUTO ) … when running speed tests the BPL-380 cpu never goes much over 50%.
HELP !! PLEASE

@richard1, may I know what device you used to do the speed test? A Windows machine? If so, have you check what is the CPU load of the Windows machine when the throughput at 286Mbps? Please always connect the client device to the LAN port of Balance 380 directly when you do the speed test.

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Thanks for a quick response… to check the problem
We used a laptop plugged into a lan port on a BT router which had the wan port plugged into the BT fibre circuit box and got just over a gig download.
then
We used the same laptop into a lan port on the BPL-380 which had wan1 port plugged into the BT fibre circuit box and got less than 300mbs.
then we went back to the BT router and got a gig and then went back to the BPL-380 and got less than 300mbs
so same cables same windows laptop same speed tests just a different router

@richard1 Is the connection method PPPoE by chance?

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Yes … it is PPPoE

Which BT router is it? Can you stick it into bridge mode? Or even just leave it as NAT for the moment and run a speedtest.

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I can’t do changes until the weekend ( there is a lot of activity going thru the network ) but the tests which were done using the BT modem/router had the default settings which was nat.
This fibre circuit does not have static public ip’s so we use DDNs in the Peplink Wan settings.

Yes but you used a laptop.

I am suggesting you use the B380 in place of that laptop. So leave the BT router doing PPPoE and put the WAN of the B380 into the LAN of the BT router with the WAN port set to DHCP client.

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Well that is an idea … but I need the B380 using DDNS for the public address allocated by BT ( we use SpeedFusion ) … I can’t use drop-in-mode because that then disallows Remote Access.

I fully expect a B380 with HW6 to work with 900mbs

I am aware that a one-off observation may not be helpful, but FWIW: We have two B380s running in HA mode against a 1Gbps fiber connection. The master pulls 925/782 to a neighboring Speedtest node (while other traffic, such as a local internet users (only a few) and small bunch of SpeedFusion connections being up).

So the B380 is demonstrably capable of running at close to 1Gbps.

Cheers,

Z

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