Why does SpeedFusion always need VPN?

Product Discussion
1

I have a newbie question: why does SpeedFusion always need VPN?

If I don’t need VPN protection, and don’t want to pay for the 20% bandwidth overhead, can I turn off the VPN and just use the features such as hot failover, WAN smoothing or bonding?

2

The “normal internet” doesn’t support those features in a standard way, so you need to make a “nonstandard” connection from your device to something with better connection to be able to have those features. Peplink’s “nonstandard” implementation, like most, is via a VPN.

You can observe that the VPN used for SpeedFusion isn’t even encrypted by default due to the CPU overhead (easy config toggle). It is a VPN but not primarily a VPN for security reasons.

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3

Speedfusion needs to tunnel the traffic to a server endpoint (such as SFC or self-hosted, or another Speedfusion-enabled device). There, all the incoming data will be processed and combined.
Speedfusion will build a VPN-Tunnel from every single WAN to your Speedfusion-Endpoint.
If you don’t need an encrypted tunnel, you can disable the encryption in the Speedfusion-Configuration:

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I see. So the 20% overhead is NOT for VPN, but just for adding additional header information on the data packets in order to manage these packets?

In other words, could Peplink choose a different way to implement SpeedFusion to remove or reduce the 20% overhead?

5

You have actually just given a fairly coherent definition of what a VPN is: “adding additional header information on the data packets in order to manage these packets”. Extra information takes space.

A VPN is not inherently secure even though 99% of the time you see the term used these days in the consumer market that is being implied.

There are tricks to reduce it, but honestly a lot of those are already employed or are impractical for other reasons (eg. CPU or latency overhead).

Note that the overhead is not a fixed 20%, it is less for larger packets (eg: a big download) and more for small packets (eg: a voice conversation).

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6

Got it. Thanks for taking time to explain these to me!