WAN Smoothing vs Bonding

[MartinLangmaid]

@mystery

You said that when you use Smoothing you use Bonding as well

No, I said WAN smoothing is a feature enhancement of bonding - which perhaps isn’t accurate. More accurately WAN smoothing is a feature enhancement of the SpeedFusion Technology (of which bonding is one feature).

@mystery

why do some products offer Smoothing and not bonding too? I.e. the Peplink Max BR1 line.

Bonding bandwidth across multiple WAN links has a considerable processing overhead - especially if encryption is enabled. Smaller devices like the BR1 would not cope very well with bonding WANs and overall throughput would be degraded. Duplicating the traffic and sending it across multiple WAN links in a fire and forget kinda way requires less processing power.

@mystery

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?

All SpeedFusion technologies are point to point ie between one Peplink appliance and another. So to take advantage of Smoothing or Bonding you would need another appliance physically hosted in a datacenter or virtually hosted in the cloud that you could create a SpeedFusion connection to. Then you would be able to use bonding or wan smoothing if your device supports that.

@mystery

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?

WAN smoothing would help in this case yes.

@mystery

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)?

WAN smoothing replicates traffic across multiple WANs. At the lowest setting this is a duplication of the traffic that is sent over multiple WANs. At the very least then you will half the total available bandwidth to you if you turned WAN smoothing on for all client traffic.

Speedfusion Bonding aggregates the available bandwidth. In ideal conditions you will be able to use around 80% of the total available bandwidth as 20% is used by SpeedFusion to manage the VPN. However if there is packet loss and jitter on individual WANs, the latency over the tunnel will vary considerably and available bandwidth / throughput will vary too as SpeedFusion looks to manage how those WAN links are used. Since this is also a point to point technology - the latency between you and the remote data center / cloud is also a factor.

@mystery

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 WAN smoothing data will be duplicated across the multiple WAN links. If you were in a video call that was 2MBps/ bidirectional the WIFI connection (with its 1MBps up) would saturate very quickly but the video would work fine over the cellular connection. The device at the remote end would just discard all the packets coming in over the wifi connection as they would be late due to increased latency.

@mystery

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?

You will have in the region of 24/4Mbps available to you when using WAN smoothing as SpeedFusion has a 20% ish overhead and you are duplicating the traffic over WIFI and Cellular.
So a VoIP call @ 160Kbps would be sent and received over both the cellular and the wifi connections at the same time. If one of those connections failed completely, had a massive latency spike or was throttled then you wouldn’t notice as the packets would still get through on the other connection.

Buy a BR1 MK2. Only turn on WAN smoothing for real time traffic (VoIP / Skype etc) so you are only duplicating the most time sensitive traffic, and just use load balancing for everything else so you get to use all the available bandwidth. Host a free virtual FusionHub Solo appliance in Vultr.com for $5/month as the central end point. Job done.