Peplink Balance One 5G Slow Xfinity Download Speeds

I currently purchased the Balance One 5G and have Xfinity hooked up to the main WAN with T-Mobile as the cellular backup. For whatever reason, the download speeds on any of the LAN ports (even tried hooking a switch up to it), seems to be very low (20-50MB) and my Xfinity plan is for 2GB (I know I won’t hit 2GB but I should be able to hit close to 1GB). My upload speeds are 200MB which is normal but I cannot get my Xfinity download speeds to be better. When using the T-Mobile SIM, I get download speeds of 200-300MB so this is only affecting my Xfinity WAN. Any ideas?

On a side note, I have mostly the default settings and the WiFi disabled…

I think I figured out the problem, it is firmware version 8.4.1 because once I downgraded to the original 8.4.0, my speeds are where they should be…

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Greg, that should not be the case. I’d suggest opening a ticket and let the good support engineers at Peplink take a look. You’ll want to attach a diag report to the ticket when running 8.4.1 and turn on RA. I’d also post the ticket number here.

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Same problem with me once i upgraded… to 8.4.1

Interesting. My advice to you is the same as I gave @Greg_Burton . Gremlins like this have been known to creep into firmware revisions and your hardware is relatively new. Let’s see what the folks at Peplink say about this.

FWIW, we just a tested with a B20X, HW3, and were unable to reproduce the issue you report. Maybe hardware specific." (We have some new B-Ones here but thought better of unboxing them.)

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I’m having this problem with a brand new B One. Router came with firmware 8.3 loaded. After configuring, I updated to 8.4.1, and noticed slow download speeds - in the 50 Mbps range. After finding this thread, I reverted back to version 8.3, and using the Ookla Speedtest app, pulled 501Mbps, in line with my ISP service level.

Peplink - any advice on how to solve this or which firmware you recommend I run?

This has been reported a few times. First step would be a conversation with the Peplink Partner from whom you purchased your router. Failing that, I’d submit a ticket. reference this thread and also post the ticket number here.

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I purchased the router from Amazon; no sense wasting any time there. (Cheapest shipping for me from the 5G Store was $75.)

Ticket number is: 24050773

So here’s an update on this issue. After trading messages with a Peplink tech and confirming my ISP service level and the speeds I was getting on firmware 8.3, he had me re-boot back to 8.4.1, and low and behold the speeds were the same and again consistent with my service level. Go figure.

Two things I’ll say about this for anyone pulling slow speeds as this thread describes.

The first is to try rebooting both the modem and the router to trigger them to re-establishing their connection. I’m pretty sure I did this somewhere along the way, and of course you have to reboot the router when switching to a different firmware version.

If that doesn’t do anything, I’d suggest trying what I in affect did, while running 8.4.1, reboot back to 8.3, test your speeds, then go back to 8.4.1, test again.

I’ll be curious to hear the results from anyone who has this issue and how it is solved.

I actually did that before (go back to 8.4.1 because I had to reboot it and forgot that it was on that firmware and the speeds went back to normal, then after about maybe a few days, it started getting slow again - I don’t recall if the modem got rebooted or not). I checked and it was on 8.4.1 and put it back to 8.4.0 and it was fine.

Just out of curiosity, what modem are you using? I am using the Hitron CODA56…

Interesting. I’ll be keeping a daily eye on mine for the next week or so, see if it reverts.

The modem I have is a Spectrum-supplied device, model ET2251. No idea who makes it? It has an integrated VoIP phone connection.

I would guess this is a symptom of the same autonegotiation issue I was having with my B One. In my case speeds were fine but 1-3 times a day internet traffic would just stop and afterwards I’d get a WAN down/WAN up alert pair in the Peplink app. I put a cheap gigabit switch between the B One and my cable modem and haven’t had an issue in over 2 weeks. Modem is Arris S33, and both Gb and 2.5Gb ports had the same problem, same modem had zero issues with previous router so I put the blame squarely on the B One, luckily other than a little bit of extra power consumption the issues was cheaply resolved.

I’ve been monitoring my B One and doing daily speed tests. Results have been per my ISP service level - approaching 600Mbps, but for some slowdown over the holiday weekend - which I attribute to lots of people being home doing things creating a large load on the ISP’s network.

I consider the issue resolved, although what got the router’s throughput up remains unexplained.