I consistently have 100Mbps down/45Mbps up with 25ms pings on my ATT aggregated (incl. 5G band) cellular connection. I do not have any other internet service other than cellular on Peplink.
My streaming device (Nvidia Shield) is connected with ethernet directly to my HD2 MBX 5G (not through a switch). I am not, nor do I want to use my PepVPN/Speedfusion bonded connection since streaming services block VPNs.
Despite adequate download speed to watch video on any of the streaming sites, I regularly experience spooling. I’ve checked DSL Report and get at least A in all categories, including bufferbloat. The spooling behavior is present and consistent regardless of the reported download bandwidth available - it behaves the same whether I have 50Mbps or 150Mbps.
I cannot find ANYTHING that addresses buffering and spooling, and general slow streaming device response (menu refresh, channel content, fast forward/rewind, etc.) in a situation where reported cellular bandwidth is much more than adequate. When I’m watching TV, none of my other clients at home are demanding LAN bandwidth. I’ve tried every Outbound Policy setup and nothing improves the situation. I’ve also tried many configurations of QoS.
Does anyone know how to optimize Peplink router settings for entertainment video streaming? I am really having a bad entertainment experience at home.
Traditionally routers have dealt with this problem using bufferbloat algorithms like fq_codel and the more recent Cake. Cellular and satellite internet have widely varying speeds and latency, making it very difficult to use traditional bufferbloat algorithms like fq_codel and Cake because they are configured with static maximum download and upload bandwidth settings. So developers have just introduced Cake Autorate scripts on OpenWRT for dynamically adjusting the settings.
Peplink has two mutually exclusive methods of tackling Bufferbloat. Enabling Network → QOS → Application → DSL / Cable Optimization has been around forever (or longer than I have been using Peplink). As best as I have ever been able to figure out, it prioritizes outgoing Ack’s.
There is a beta implementation of fq_codel on Peplink called “Mitigate Bufferbloat” which currently only works on the upload traffic from Peplink, not the download traffic (perhaps fixed in version 9??). If your problem is in the uploads, then this may help, especially if you reduce the upload speed maximum bandwidth to something that is almost always available, probably not anywhere near 25Mbps.
Other thoughts:
Watching the Peplink Real-Time display while streaming may give some clues about what is happening, since you may be able see your bandwidth throughput dropping (and whether other devices in your house are significantly adding internet demand - does your streaming work if nothing else is running?). Peplink WAN Quality, will show the latency of pings and whether or not they are being dropped. You may also want to try fast.com’s speedtest. It is made by netflix, so may give you a better idea of what streaming is experiencing.
Nvidia Shield’s buffering performance may not be as good as other streaming devices such as Roku, Chromecast or Apple TV (a quick search indicates that Nvidia has had some buffering problems in the last year). In my opinion, you should at least test with something like the Roku to see how it works in comparison. In fact, testing streaming on a tablet or phone in full resolution if available on your cellular plan, may also tell you something about Nvidia Shield’s buffering performance.
In addition to watching real time bandwidth, as has been suggested, I would also watch cpu usage. Probably not the issue, but you never know.
The Peplink local web interface does not allow this as these two things are on different pages, but just open a new browser tab, then split it off and paste in the local web UI URL and you can see two different UI windows at the same time
Also, have you configured the WAN up/down speeds with reasonably accurate numbers?
