Very slow speed when bonding

I have a Peplink Balance380 and a Pepwave Max700 that I use for bonding.
The Balance380 is located at our office and conected to a 100/100 Mbit fiber.
The Max700 has 5 internet connections - both 4G, 3G and Wimax via ethernet.
Each connected has been speed tested separately (creating a site-to-site VPN with only 1 connection available)
The fastest connection gives me about 10 Mbit/s upload, the next 2 Mbit/s, and the last three varies from 0.1 Mbps to 0.5 Mbps
The problem is that when I bond all 5 connections the slower connections seems to lower the speed of the entire bonding. My bonded upload speed is below 1 Mbit/s.
And that is far from enough when you want to stream live broadcast video.

Some might ask why I do not just remove the slowest connections - but my problem is that the system is going to be mounted in a car. And at the other end of the town it might be just the opposite situation - so the former slow connections now are the fastest. So it will be impossible to guess what connections I should disconnect.

I hope some of you Peplink users have experienced the same problem and found a solution.

Note to Peplink support: I have allredy created a ticket #727938] but I haven’t heard from support for 3 weeks, so I am a little worried that our mails might disappear in a spam filter. If that is the case, please write me on the forum and I will send you a new mail.

Best regards

Janus Jacobsen

Janus, We have responded your case via our ticketing system.

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I have the same issue since i purchased the max700 (so far its still not fixed and its 3 months since i have received the unit) Please let me know if they get it fixed by you this way i will know what can be done to have it fixed.

Hi Janus5, Were you able to resolve the slow speed on bonded connection issues? Did PEPLINK get back to you with a solution? We are evaluating this product and need some answers before we make a choice…

Thank you for your help in advance!

I’m encountering the same problem, has anyone found a solution yet?
When one of the 3g connection goes bad the whole bonding is affected!

thank you.

Very curious about this, please post answer or resolution here too. -thanks

It got a little better with the 5.4 firmware, but still I most often get better results with one modem attached than with 2 or 4 modems.
Very interested if some of you have found a solution.

We have seen similar issues in a few deployments as well. What we have noticed is that WAN latency is the key to good SpeedFusion. If you have 2 cable modems that register a 53ms latency and 2 dsl modems that register a 180ms latency, you will see a decrease in performance on the speedfusion tunnel when the Cable and DSL are used together The bonding still works but the throughput is not as noticable.

For example, lets assume Cable1 and Cable2 are 20/2 and DSL1 and DSL2 are 5/1.
When Cable1 and Cable2 are bonded you might see speeds like 35/3.5, however, after adding the DSL1 and DSL2 which have higher latencies, the speedfusion could show 40/4 which is far less of an improvement offered by the two cable modems alone.

When adding satellite to the picture, we have actually seen decrease in performance because of satellite bursting technology.

A few tips, log in to you router, from the dashboard click status for speedfusion. Click the blue arrow next to the speedfusion tunnel name. You will see all of your WAN circuits, as well as the speed they are using, the drop rate, and the latency. With one of our clients, we had to set the DSL as a backup because the latency was too high. The client was still happy because of the redundancy offered by the slower connection.

In our research, we have noticed that when any of the WAN’s have a latency that varies by more than 75-100ms, the maximium bonding capacity of the speedfusion is decreased. As a note, VoIP runs best when the latency is lower than 150ms to the gateway.

If you need any help, feel free to contact my office at [email protected]. We would be more than happy to look at your router for you.

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Hi Peter.

Thanks for your input. I’ve noticed the same issue, when there is a large difference in latency on the modems. We use 4G and 3G - the latency is ranging from 30 ms to 1500 ms. Sometimes we can disable the modems with the largest latency but it is difficult when we use it in a moving car for live video transmission. The latency changes every minut depending on link quality. I have tried some other 3G/4G bonding solutions (not Peplink) and I’ve noticed that they much more often disables a modem when the latency gets to high. So a solution with 6 modems often only use the best 3 connections for transfer. I hope Peplink will make a similar solution.

Janus,

I have actually already discussed this with Peplink so I know they are working on a great solution to handle links with varying latencies. What I do right now is place high latency connections in a different priority group so that we have redundancy but not bonding of those circuits.

This method would not work in your senario because you will be diving and latencies will change based on location.

Which circuits provide you with a .1 and .5 Mbps, are those 3G?

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We run a similar environement, 1 Balance 210 connected to a 100/100Mb/s fiber and at the other end a 310 connected to 2 DSL line. The ADSL line are from the same provider, same latency.

1 DSL provider (WAN1) UP / WAN 2 DOWN: download speed = 13mb/s / - upload 0,96Mb/s -latency 30/51 ms
1 DSL provider (WAN2) UP / WAN 1 DOWN : download speed = 13mb/s upload 0,96Mb/s - latency 30/51ms

Both DSL lines UP, WAN1 & WAN 2 : download speed : 7mb/s max (2 - 7 mb/s, average 6 mb/s) - Upload 1,5 mb/s - latency 30/51ms

We are evaluatiing Peeplinks product to replace our MPLS networks with cheap regular ADSL lines : except for upload and balance of link utilization, WE CAN’T SEE ANY BANDWITH AGGREGATION, it’s beter to have 1 Single link then 2 … Any comments?

Hello, I’ve been experiencing the same problems as you guys. But I do have some experience in this field. I’m from Brazil and I have developed a system for live streaming video for TV Channels, mainly I work for ESPN Brazil. I’ve been doing this for 4 years and since then I tested two 3G bonding systems. The first one was a Chinese solution from “lightspeed” (http://www.lightspeed.com.tw/3gbonding.htm) I used it for one year, but in the end I quit and bought a Peplink + Pepwave system.

Both of then suffer the same issues, when the latency of one of the channel grows, all the bonding is affected. I always had to keep monitoring the system and deciding which SIM card or modem I have to take out of the system.
Most of the times bonding 2 modems is better than using 4 or 6. Based on my experience, bonding a lot of modems only increases the chance of crashing the video stream.

Would be great to have a system that could read each situation and decide which connection should stay in the bonding.

Another big problem for me is: I’m always travelling abroad for events, and overseas connections have a big latency (over 300ms) this way I can NEVER get a good bonding when I’m abroad, since my Peplink 210 is always in Brazil, and I’m travelling with the Pepwave MAX700.
I imagine that the only possible way to get around this issue is, have a “network” of peplinks around the globe so this way when I’m in Europe I could connect to a geographically closer unit, create a good bonding and that unit could connect to the one in Brazil, pushing the information trough a better internet pipe.
Would be great if Peplink could provide such service, maybe a Peplink in the “cloud”, in every continent.

But i’m not a 100% sure that this could work. I have to test it to see. Right now I’m in Europe for an event, if someone have a working peplink in Europe would be nice to test it. Latency from Europe to US is lightly better than latency from Europe to Brazil. So maybe a server based in US could work as well.

Hope you guys could understand it all, it’s a bit hard to put it into words, specially in a different language.
If you care, here is a demo of my work. It’s all in portuguese, but you can have a idea of what I’m doing. http://youtu.be/aoPNjvEESUA

Thank you all.

catherineD, I would love to look at your configuration. Call my office so I can look at your setup. 352-505-4567

pedro84, unfortunately latency is a huge contributor to poor bonding. You are going to have even more issues because you are goign to have latency and a large number of hops. Can you post your latency details?

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Thanks,

I’ve opened a case, they are working on it.

Firmware 5.4.6 bandwitch & stability issue vs 5.3.12 seems to be affected by latencies above 45ms.

Hello Peter.
Yes, I know that big latency is equal to poor bonding. Right now I’m getting 350 - 400ms on each USB modem.
When I run a speedfusion test for upload, with one USB modem I get 1mb - 1.3mb of upload, but if I try to bond 2 or more modems I get really poor results.

That’s why I was suggesting that if I could reach a closer Peplink server, and that server could push the traffic to my peplink in Brazil, it might work.

Hi.

Just want to say we are still seeing low performance with bonding but we found that using UDP (for videotransmission) we get a much better bonding performance than with TCP.
But unfortunately that is not a solution for all cases.

catherineD, did you get a good resolution to this issue? It still seems to be a problem with our equipment. Your example of two identical circuits that, when bonded, run slower than either of the individual circuits, seems to show a likely firmware issue.

Like many others, I’ve resorted to just keeping my fastest link as priority 1 and setting the other links to a lower priority for redundancy. Just can’t seem to achieve any gain in throughput via the bonding at any of our sites.

I have same issue until now, since in my country there is no good provider in every place anyone ever try cut-latency feature?

Hi,

If you encounter bad performance on all your WAN links, you will not get a good bonding result.

Anyway you may open ticket for us to investigate the problem.

Thank you.

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hi is there any concrete solution on this bonding issue? im also experiencing slow connectivity during speed bonding. Using single line or active standby is way faster than speedbonding. Hope to hear from peplink team.

Thanks