What is an acceptable drop packet rate?

I’ve got a Peplink Balance 210 and 310 connected via SpeedFusion. The connections on the 210 are cable modem (20Mbps down/up) and DSL (1.5Mbps down/512kbs up), and on the 310 are 2xDS1 (3Mbps down/up), and DSL (10Mbps down/1.5Mbps up).

I’ve noticed that the SpeedFusion throughput is pretty low, rarely getting to 1 Mbps between the two sites. Upon checking the drop packet rate, I’ve found that the DS1 connection is experiencing more dropped packets than the DSL on the 310 unit, as much as 6 or 7 per second.

There doesn’t seem to be any speed issues when downloading via Internet, just between the sites and SpeedFusion.

Both units are running 5.4.9 firmware. I’ve tried manually setting the WAN link rate between all the different speeds at both full and half duplex, and with and without Advertise Link Speed checked. Nothing seems to help. When the DS1 connection is turned off, I regularly get 1 Mbps throughput, but all the dropped packets on the DS1 connection seem to slow the throughput to a crawl, around 10 kbps to 200 kbps.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to get better throughput in SpeedFusion?

Thanks!

Is the cable modem on the 210 really 20x20? If it is, you should not bond it with a 512K up circuit. Imagine the 310 receiving half the packets at 20M and the other half at only 512K.

You can change the priorities of the connections within the SpeedFusion profile. On your 210 I recommend to put the cable modem as priority 1 and DSL as priority 2.

What is your primary goal? Do you want faster transfers from the 210 to the 310, or vice-versa?

HI Tim,

The cable modem isn’t guaranteed, but I double checked and it’s more like 20 down/5 up. I can definitely change the 210 to have the DSL be priority 2.

Most of the traffic will be going from the 310 to the 210, so the goal would be faster transfers from the 310 to the 210.

Thanks!

Hey Victor,

These are the issues we have to take in account when dealing with these “Up To” kind of commodity circuits. Commodity links are never guaranteed and are heavily marketed this way.

One of the cable modems at my house is sold as 100 Mbps down by 15 Mbps up. On a perfect day I will get 90-95 down, but at heavy times this will crawl down to 5-15…