I am confused. You said that when you use Smoothing you use Bonding as well but then why do some products offer Smoothing and not bonding too? I.e. the Peplink Max BR1 line.
Is a special configuration, VPN, device, anything needed to take advantage of Smoothing or Bonding? You mention a “tunnel” is needed to use Smoothing? So I can’t just connect a few WANs to one device (i.e. MK2 or 210/310) and have that one device provide connectivity to vehicle/RV/boat? What is this tunnel I need?
My use case is as follows: installation in a vehicle, RV, or boat… I will have 2-3 WANs: a) cellular, b) WiFi as WAN 2.4ghz, and c) possibly WiFi as WAN 5ghz.
In some cases 1-2 of the WANs may be unreliable especially as a result of movement but I do not want to have video conference, VoIP, etc drop. For that it sounds like WAN smoothing will help?
What is the maximum speed if speedfusion is enabled (smoothing or bonding)? Will using bonding (not available on all peplink products) instead of smoothing provide a faster connection in times when one WAN is significantly slower than the other? Or is Smoothing smart enough to handle both reliability (no connections dropped) AND speed (multiple WANs working together)?
Now to complicate things further, what happens when one WAN has a lower latency but is slower? For example, I am finding WiFi to have a lower latency than cellular but bandwidth seems to be significantly lower at times (i.e. Cellular might be 30mbps down / 5mbps up with a higher latency and WiFi may be 5 mbps down / 1mbps up with a lower latency). With Smoothing does that mean I am limited to the lower latency WAN and thus a max of 5 mbps / 1mbps speeds? Or can it somehow combine the WANs and I will have 35mbps/6mbps available? What happens if I use Bonding and one connection is bad/very high latency/packet loss/etc, how will Speedfusion handle?
I am just trying to figure out which device I should go with and which Speedfusion technology I would use/configure?
For example, a MK2 has cellular and dual-band simultaneous WiFi as WAN available but it says it can only do Smoothing/Hot failover not Bonding. Am I better off getting a Router such as the 210/310 that can do all three: Smoothing, Bonding, and Hot failover and then have separate devices connected to it (cellular router/modem, WiFi AP for 2.4GHz, and WiFi AP for 5GHz)? I’d much rather manage everything from one interface instead of having to log-into four separate devices though… (peplink router + those three WAN devices).
Maybe I am making this more complicated than it needs to be?
Thanks for any insight!