I have just purchased and started using a Peplink MAX H2D.
Setup
A single home office, where the only internet connections available are mobile 4G/LTE. I have inserted 2 such sim cards from different providers.
We use the router’s Wi-Fi to connect, more or less, 2 PCs and 2 smart phones.
I am the network admin.
Goal
Combine the connections from the 2 different mobile internet sims into 1 faster more reliable connection.
Questions
How can I achieve that goal?
How much of that is happening automatically?
Is load balancing happening automatically so for every request the best of the 2 connections is used, including if 1 connection goes down the other will be used? If not how can I set this up?
Is bonding/aggregation happening automatically so the 2 mobile internet inputs are being combined into 1 wifi output with combined speed? If not how can I set this up?
I don’t think using FusionHub or getting a 2nd SpeedFusion enabled device is appropriate for our use case.
SpeedFusion is a VPN technology, which means you will always need a 2nd Peplink endpoint, at a location with a high speed internet connection.
This can be FusionHub software, or another SpeedFusion enabled Peplink/Pepwave device.
SpeedFusion Bonding will not work without setting up a SpeedFusion VPN tunnel.
Since we’re talking about a single home office, I suspect that loadbalancing is sufficient for you.
You do not require any other hardware or software to achieve this, you do need to configure it, however.
The most commonly used loadbalancing algorithm is ‘Weighted Balance’, which equally distributes the traffic over the available WAN connections.
You can set this up like this:
Log into the Pepwave MAX HD2;
Go to ‘Advanced’ and click on ‘Outbound Policy’ in the sidebar;
Click on ‘New Rule’, which will make a new menu show up;
Give the rule a name and set source, destination and protocol to ‘Any’;
Make sure ‘Algorithm’ is set to ‘Weighted Balance’;
Put ‘Cellular 1’ and ‘Cellular 2’ on 10 at ‘Load Distribution Weight’, the others can be set to 0;
Click ‘Save’ to save the rule and click ‘Save and Apply’ in the top right hand corner after that.
Your Pepwave MAX HD2 will prioritize your load balancing rules from top to bottom, in case you’re configuring more than one.
‘Weighted Balance’ might be the most common used load balancing algorithm, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for you, since I don’t know all the details and requirements of your application.
I’d suggest you read up on Peplink’s 8 loadbalancing algorithms, to determine if ‘Weighted Balance’ is really the best choice for your application.
Keep in mind that testing your connection speed at Speedtest.net, or other speedtest websites, will show your aggregrated bandwidth, because sites like these use all available WAN connections at the same time.
In practise, an internet session will only use one WAN connection, so Speedtest results are very misleading.
Tip: Use SIM-cards of different providers if you can, this provides better bandwidth results in a lot of use cases.
I was able to set that rule but this rule had already been set by default.
Service Name
HTTPS_Persistence
Enable
[x]
Source
Any
Destination
Any
Protocol
TCP
Port
443
Algorithm
Persistence
Persistence Mode
By Source
Load Distribution
Auto
Terminate Sessions on Link Recovery
[ ]
That Peplink decided to automatically configure that suggests to me that not having it might cause problems. So I kept it there and added our Weighted Balance rule bellow it, which makes me wonder if thats a bit pointless, if that rule never gets used given its always trumped by the Persistence rule above it.
The previous knowledge-base forum link actually explaining Peplink SpeedFusion Bonding vs Peplink Balance Internet Link Load Balancing. For your case it’s more on “Peplink Balance Internet Link Load Balancing” case. Can you please check on it again ?