Question on Bandwidth Throttling

We’ve been using the individual bandwidth throttling to prevent users from hogging bandwidth and it works great. Originally I thought the Group Bandwidth Reservation feature did the same thing, except for a group, but apparently this is not the case.

If the Peplinks can throttle one user’s downloads, why can’t they throttle a group of users the same way? This would allow us to carve out and reserve sections of bandwidth for priority data, such as voice.

If subnet 192.168.1.x is capped at 8Mb on a 10Mb WAN circuit, you could reserve 2Mb for voice on the 10.1.1.x subnet, and prevent congestion problems from affecting call quality. Any chance of this becoming a feature? Or is there a way to do this already that I’m missing?

Can you explain further for the above ? May i know what is the expected behavior for the Bandwidth Reservation & what is apparently not the case ?

To ensure VOIP traffics quality, we will always recommend to enable QOS Application priority and this will ensure VOIP traffics to send first prior to other application. Please refer to the attached screenshot.


I do have QoS enabled, but the problem comes when multiple users start downloading heavily (ie multiple YouTube streams), which maxes out the bandwidth to the point where voice quality drops since QoS isn’t maintained on the downstream side.

The group bandwidth allocation doesn’t work in the sense that if you allocate 80% to a group, that group can still use up to 100% of the bandwidth if there’s little to no competing traffic. If users try to make a phone call while 5 people are on YouTube, the incoming audio is degraded considerably, even with QoS and group bandwidth limits enabled. Outgoing audio works fine, it’s the incoming data that it seems the Peplink can’t dynamically adjust for.

If I set a group bandwidth restriction at 80% on a 10Mb WAN connection and that user runs a speed test, the users in that group still get the full 10Mb.

Which VOIP protocol are you using? SIP?

Have you configured the upload and download bandwidth on each WAN?

Please take note, Group Bandwidth Reservation will reserved the defined bandwidth to each user group when a WAN connection is in full load.

Yes, we’re using SIP / RTP , have the bandwidth set properly on the WAN connection (10Mb / 10Mb), and YouTube streamers are still somehow managing to cause audio problems.

This doesn’t happen on our Peplink 380 we have at our office (same settings, same phone system), but does happen with our client’s Peplink Balance 20 (which we swapped for a Balance 305 that does the same thing). AT&T is claiming it’s because of bandwidth congestion.

Some ISP’s will intentionally mess with SIP packets unless you subscribe to their phone service. I’m not saying this is the case for sure and they will never admit that but I have seen cases where we force the SIP traffic through our SpeedFusion VPN tunnel and the audio problems disappear.

As a temporary workaround I suggest to just kill the youtube traffic as the voice traffic is much more important:
http://www.peplink.com/knowledgebase/use-peplinks-firewall-feature-to-block-youtube/

Thanks Tim, this was one of our suspicions as well… If there ever is a way to “hard throttle” group traffic in a future release, maybe it would be another good way to work around this.