Slower ISP Taking Priority in Downloads

[ZOwensby]

Hello,

I have been using a Balance 20 unit with a 12/2 Mbps ISP and a 5/.8 Mbps ISP for a month now. Overall the product works well with my tweaking here and there, but I am still finding that the WAN #2 (slower) ISP gets the majority of the downloads. Trying various settings in download bandwidth and speed don’t seem to make as much difference as I had hoped. Did I miss something in the manual and/or can anyone suggest a configuration that would be the most efficient?

For what it is worth, I was using the Balance 20 with just the slower ISP mentioned above and it was labeled as WAN #1 then. I reconfigured for the two ISP’s (with the faster one now as WAN #1), made a configuration backup file, reverted to factory settings, and then reinstalled the old settings in order to wipe the history data. Could the router still be holding onto the original (slower) ISP as the priority for some reason?

More Microchips Than Sense,
Dr. Z.

[Haruki]

Did I miss something in the manual and/or can anyone suggest a configuration that would be the most efficient?
Could the router still be holding onto the original (slower) ISP as the priority for some reason?

First off, please make sure that the balance is running the latest and greatest 5.4.9 firmware just in case. You can download the firmware from the following link.

http://www.peplink.com/support/downloads/balance-firmware-and-user-manual/

> Could the router still be holding onto the original (slower) ISP as the priority for some reason?

No it couldn’t. Configurations are set up in the way you see in the GUI of the Peplink Balance.

You might need to tweak the Outbound rules in the Balance based on your requirements if you haven’t tried it. Please see the following KB article to see if this helps or not.

Understanding & Configuring Outbound Policy

A flexible rule-based configuration design enables the fine-tuning of outbound traffic at a per-service level by allowing multiple rules to be configured. The following types of Outbound Traffic Rules are available: Weighted Balance Persistence Enforced Priority Overflow Least Used Lowest Latency For more information related to Load Balancing Algorithms, please refer to this page.   Weighted Balance Weighted Balance rules enable configuring the proportion of outgoing data traffic to…

Please keep us posted. Thank you.

[ZOwensby]

Thanks for the reply…

Forgive me if this sounds naive, but what do any of the outbound settings have to do with my downloading issues? Regardless, I have tried a few of the weighted configurations and will see how it works over the next few days.

Also, with the Balance 20 model that doesn’t have SpeedFusion, do I understand that the speeds of multiple ISP’s cannot be combined for one service (like NetFlix), but multiple services can be coordinated between the two ISP’s? I say this because I see no inbound configuration settings other than port forwarding and all of my random speed tests have never exceeded the speed of my fastest ISP.

Peace,
Dr. Z.

[ZOwensby]

Anyone? Anyone? Is this a sign that I am more naive than I realize?

[Tim_S]

Hi Dr. Z-

The outbound settings actually have a lot to do with your download activity, this is because when you request a file to download it goes OUT a WAN connection and of course then the file comes back on that same WAN connection.

In your case, I would suggest using the weighted balance algorithm and give the faster WAN connection a higher weight.

You are correct about the Balance 20 that doesn’t have SpeedFusion. You will have access to a total of 17Mbps of bandwidth in your case, but for a single session like a file download or streaming video, it will only come across one WAN connection at a time. If you have multiple sessions taking place you will definitely see that both WAN’s are being used.

Some customers will install a download manager on their computer, and this will allow for multiple sockets to be opened up for a single file download and max out your total 17Mbps bandwidth. Also, customers who use Torrent clients absolutely love the Peplink because by default they will open up as many connections as possible, quickly saturating the WAN links for super fast downloads.