WAN smoothing over Sat + Cellular

Product Discussion SpeedFusion Connect
1

I have a BR1 with two WAN Connections, a relatively slow Satellite link and a much faster Cellular link to the internet. I now wonder what the best SpeedFusion configuration would be for a good overall connection that i can use for video calls and also to surf the web and work with remote files from my fileserver at the office etc.

I saw a video on youtube explaining the setup of WAN Smoothing but they selected a different priority for each link which does not seem to make sense. When i do that on my BR1 (i.e. set Prio1 for Cellular data and prio2 for SAT data) i see no traffic going across the SAT link and the Staistics show no redundant Wan smoothing packets (blue triangles). As soon as I set both the SAT and Cellular link to prio1 i see blue triangles appear and i have traffic on both interfaces.

so did I understand correctly, that the video is wrong and I need to choose at least two interfaces with the same prio in order to enable WAN Smoothing?

sadly i have some other users on my network, so speed tests are a bit unreliable at the moment, but it seems that the overall speed with WAN Smoothing enabled is closer to the raw Cellular link speed than the much slower Satellite link speed. Do i Assume correctly, that with WAN smoothing over my two links i get more or less the speed and latency of the faster of the two links at any given time?

with wan smoothing enabled, does it make a difference what “Link Failure Detection Time” i configure in the PepVPN Settings?

so bottom line: in my situation with these two very different links WAN Smoothing across with both links set to prio1 is the best solution, right?

and now the extra question: would I profit from buying a bigger Peplink router that allows WAN Bonding or would that not add much speed and reliablity because of the extreme dfiferences in both latency and bandwith between my two connections?

kind regards
Chrsitian

2

Video is wrong you are right.

Yes that’s right.

No not really. If a WAN link fails though, packets might get duplicated on the single WAN until the failed one has been marked as unhealthy. Something to test I guess.

I think so. The only other approach might be to use hot failover by default for everything and just use WAN smoothing for real time / important traffic.

I would expect the BR1 to be a CAT6 modem? You would likely see a benefit using a Transit Duo CAT12 (especially if you could add another cellular connection from a different operator of course).

3

We have an option to enable WAN smoothing for single link. Please check the attached screenshot. This will benefit for single link cases.

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image.png1010Ă—674 45.5 KB

4

True, but its a very specific (and I would argue rare) use case - so I think the video is misleading when it shows WAN smoothing enabled but WAN links using different priorities.

The main goal of WAN smoothing is to take advantage of more than one WAN so that when packetloss (or high latency events) exists on one, we don’t expect it on another so the duplicated packets still get through (with the lowest latency).

I’d be interested to learn when duplicate packets on the same WAN link has fixed a problem and what that problem was… I guess on fixed line connections where there is minimal bufferbloat WAN smoothing might indeed help, but I would expect FEC to work more efficiently in those cases?

5

thanks for your prompt and detailed answers. I’ll check what exact cat modem my BR1 has and consider buying a faster one :slight_smile: anyway, activating speedfusion already helped significantly improve the user experience :slight_smile:

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