I’m thinking about using a Balance 210 to bond two slow dsl connections which are steady, low latency, but slow.
I also have a weak LTE signal at this location that often, but not always, delivers speed 10x to 15x that of the dsl (10-15 mbps).
However, where the cell signal comes in is not an ideal place to locate an expensive router.
Question: would it work well to have the balance 210 with the extra WAN license option to get 3 wan ports and connect one wan port to the BR1 mini LTE-A wih the BR1 mini in bridged mode?
That way I could run 100’ of ethernet cable between the Balance 210 and the BR1 mini while keeping the antenna coax as short as possible to minimize lte signal loss (and possibly even mount the BR1 mini outside in a protective enclosure)
Or would an embedded LTE modem in the same peplink router that handled the speedfusion be an advantage? Would speedfusion do something differently with an embedded or usb-connected LTE modem than with the BR1-mini handing off the lte connection on the ethernet wan port?
To bond with Speedfusion you need another Speedfusion enabled device or run a Solo on a VM. All traffic would be routed through it. There are some good threads on this topic. Expect 20-40% bandwidth to be lost as overhead.
Yes, already setup a Solo instance running with a single PepVPN connection (not speedfusion yet) to get a sense of it.
20-40%? I was thinking 20% overhead when bonding 2 dsl lines from what the 5g store said. Is the 40% overhead in your range because of my idea here to try and use a third connection based on the number of connections bonded, or because the third connection will be LTE vs DSL?
Yes, that should work. To have a component of the SpeedFusion run through the BR1 you would have to make sure that either the other end of the connection is IP addressable, or the B210 WAN port used by the BR1 is IP addressable from the outside. With a Solo running on a VPS with a static IP address it would work (case #1). Be mindful of the difference in latency of DSL v. cellular - I don’t know if the difference for your set-up is significant enough to create issues (your circumstances may vary )
Personally I set great store in simplicity - having tried (and we are still using) variants of both your scenarios, for production runs I prefer an architecture with a single router handling both wired and cellular WANs. Complexity has its cost (in maintenance and configuration management).
I would avoid external USB modems, they have in my experience tended to be unreliable for sustained 24/7 performance.
Finally: Before spending too much money on SpeedFusion, you may want to see how Peplink’s load balancing algorithms would work for you
The reason I’m looking to SpeedFusion is to provide more bandwidth for single uploads (and downloads, but mostly uploads.) So not a lot of individual connections that can be load balanced but simple tasks like sending a 20 MB email and having it send when you hit the send button instead of having to take a nap and hope it sent
With my current antenna I found a 25’ length of LMR 400 performs worse than a 5’ length; my signal strength isn’t very good even with the 5’ length. (already using a quality prebuilt cable)
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