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Evaluating Peplink SpeedFusion Announcements

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Write By: admin Published In: Peplink/Pepwave Created Date: 2016-10-19 Hits: 617 Comment: 0 ABB Tropos
source: https://www.peplinkdistributor.nl/blog/evaluating-peplink-speedfusion Alvarion
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source: https://www.peplinkdistributor.nl/blog/evaluating-peplink-speedfusion-part-2
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Microwave
One question that often comes up when evaluating SpeedFusion bonding performance is that Technologies
Server Systems
Speedtest.net says that I have 10Mbps on this landline/4G LTE, but SpeedFusion says it is only 5Mbps? Gen. Networking
Gen. Accessories

There are a couple of dimensions to this puzzle.

Packet Encapsulation
First of all SpeedFusion is a point-to-point virtual private network (VPN) protocol. Like every other VPN protocol e.g.
IPsec and L2TP etc., SpeedFusion does encapsulation on your network traffic for routing purposes. This is similar to
how courier adds labelling to your parcel for shipping.

This extra layer of encapsulation costs 10 to 20% of bandwidth. In return, it provides all the sweetness and benefits of a
VPN and, uniquely to SpeedFusion, bandwidth bonding.

VPN connects two remote networks as if they were one e.g. connecting a remote branch to the headquarter and
allow it to access resources hosted at the headquarter. Bandwidth bonding allows you to use multiple internet
connections of different underlying technologies at the same time for extra bandwidth and resiliency.

Different Routes
The second dimension is that

It is a completely different road going from where you are to speedtest.net and where you are to your Peplink router at the
other end of the SpeedFusion connection.
For starter, speedtest.net and other speed test services automatically gear you to a server nearest you for the speed
test. The bandwidth you have to this server, as you can imagine, may not truly reflect the bandwidth you have for
day-to-day web browsing, emailing or audio/video conferencing activities where your traffic may need to go to a
different continent.
For SpeedFusion, the traffic is going from where you are to the Peplink router at the other end of the SpeedFusion
connection. There your Peplink router is using one or multiple internet services from different internet service
providers. The route between you and your Peplink router at the other end of the SpeedFusion connection is
completely different than the route between you and a speedtest.net server nearest you.

Preferential Lane for Speed Test

Our experience also tells us that

Mobile or landline internet service providers often give preferential treatment on their network for speed test traffic.
Because simply they know it is the first thing a customer would do when assessing the speed of their service.

Using the result from speedtest.net to estimate the bandwidth you have in general or the bandwidth you have in
SpeedFusion is then no different than using the road condition of a preferential congestion-free highway to your
nearest convenience store, to gauge your daily commute on the public road to and from work, where sadly accidents
and traffic jam are the norm. This as you can see will not give you a useful estimation.

Peplink SpeedFusion Built-in Test Tools

What would then be a better tool to evaluating the SpeedFusion bandwidth? Your Peplink router has it built-in.

Your Peplink router has a built-in TCP and UDP speed test tools that enable you to evaluate the SpeedFusion
bandwidth available from one point to another.
Go to Status > SpeedFusion on your Peplink router web admin page. There you will see a table of all the
SpeedFusion connections this Peplink Balance or Pepwave MAX has. Identify the SpeedFusion connection you want
to perform speed test on. To the far right, you will find a little speed-o-meter icon. Click on it to bring up the PepVPN
Test and Analyser tools.
PepVPN Test
Two protocols we can use to perform a speed test.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main transmission protocols of the internet. It is designed to
provide reliable delivery. It uses packet loss as a measure of network congestion and will dial down the traffic when it
sees packet loss.

For landline internet connection, TCP speed test will give you a good idea of how much SpeedFusion bandwidth is
available between your Peplink routers.

If we are however doing SpeedFusion bonding on wireless or mobile 4G LTE internet, it may be a good ides to use
UDP speed test instead.

User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a transmission protocol designed for time-sensitive application such as audio/video
streaming or VoIP. It does not have congestion control mechanism. It considers timely transmission more important
than reliable delivery. It lets packet drop rather than requesting retransmission.
Wireless or mobile 4G LTE internet connections often have a higher and more volatile packet loss than landline
connections. TCP may mistaken this fluctuation in packet loss as a sign of network issue and decide to dial down the
traffic. This will give us a lower bandwidth result than the actual bandwidth available.

This is why, for wireless or mobile 4G LTE internet, UDP speed test will probably give you a better idea of how much
SpeedFusion bandwidth is available between your Peplink routers than TCP speed test.

And that is not all Peplink has in store.

PepVPN Analyser
On top of the PepVPN Test tools, your Peplink router also features a PepVPN Analyser. It automates a series of TCP
upload speed test on each of the possible paths between your Peplink routers.

For example in a SpeedFusion setup of one Peplink Balance with 1x landline internet and one Pepwave MAX with 2x
4G LTE, there will be 2 possible paths in total between them — going between landline internet #1 to 4G LTE #1, and
between landline internet #1 to 4G LTE #2.

Whereas in a SpeedFusion setup of one Peplink Balance with 2x landline internets and one Pepwave MAX with 2x
4G LTE, there will be 4 possible paths in total between them — going between landline internet #1 to 4G LTE #1,
between landline internet #1 to 4G LTE #2, between landline internet #2 to 4G LTE #1, and between landline internet
#2 to 4G LTE #2.

The result of PepVPN Analyser is a table of the TCP upload speeds of each of these individual point-to-point paths, and of
the bonded connection using all of these paths. The table will display the packet loss rates and latencies during the tests
alongside the TCP upload speeds. This will be helpful in identifying connection with high- latency and/or packet loss that is
dragging down the performance of the overall bonded SpeedFusion connection.

Speedtest.net as well as other online speed test services are handy in gauging your internet speed. For estimating
SpeedFusion bandwidth however, for reasons discussed above, it may provide a false expectation and may do more
harm than help.

Bonding gives you no more or even less bandwidth than one 4G LTE? See Below.

1 + 1 = 1?
Another question that often comes up when evaluating SpeedFusion bonding performance is that

I have 15Mbps on one 4G LTE. How come when I bond two 4G LTE, the bonded bandwidth is still 15Mbps?

There is something behind the scene.

Fixed Bandwidth Pool

First thing first. It is important to make sure that we are measuring SpeedFusion bandwidth properly. Here are steps
for evaluating Peplink SpeedFusion.

Here the problem is likely to do with

4G LTE mobile carriers have a fixed pool of bandwidth at the backhaul and they share this fixed pool between their SIM
cards.
This way regardless of how many 4G LTE connections we use on the Peplink routers, the total bonded SpeedFusion
bandwidth will be limited by this 15Mbps fixed bandwidth pool at the carrier backend.
And it is rather easy to verify.

Speed Test. In Parallel.

If the problem is with bandwidth sharing at the 4G LTE carrier backhaul, we should be able to reproduce it without
using Peplink SpeedFusion at all.

To isolate this problem, we will go back to an old friend – speedtest.net.

Speedtest.net measures how much bandwidth each of the two 4G LTE connections has to the nearest speedtest.net
server.

If we do two speed tests at the same time on the two 4G LTE connections, we will be able to see how much
bandwidth the 4G LTE mobile carriers can provide to each of the two 4G LTE, when they are used concurrently.
This is our setup.
Setup #1 on the left is connected to one Pepwave MAX BR1 with one 4G LTE SIM card from KPN, a 4G LTE carrier in
the Netherlands.

Setup #2 on the right is connected to another Pepwave MAX BR1 with also one 4G LTE from KPN.

The two setups are completely separate. Simply two laptops each with one 4G LTE connection via a MAX BR1. There
is no Peplink SpeedFusion bandwidth bonding.

If you do not have a MAX BR1, you can insert the 4G LTE SIM cards in two different smartphones or two 4G routers
of any kind and do the same test.
Now we do speed tests.

First, we do a speed test on the setup #1.

14Mbps of download bandwidth and 13.4 upload bandwidth to the speedtest.net server. Decent.

And then we do a speed test on setup #2.

10.4Mbps of download bandwidth and 15.2 upload bandwidth to the speedtest.net server. Not so much different that
the other setup.
Now it gets interesting. We do the speed tests at the same time.

Imagine.

In a world where there is no bandwidth limitation and bandwidth sharing at the 4G LTE carrier backhaul, if we do the two
speed tests concurrently we should expect roughly the same results on each of the 4G LTE as when we do the two speed
tests separately.

The world never fails to amaze us.

Bandwidth Ceiling
These are the speed test results when the tests are done concurrently.

When speed tests are done concurrently, download and upload bandwidth of each of the 4G LTE drop to roughly half
of what we had before.

This points to a fixed bandwidth pool of around 15Mbps download and upload at the 4G LTE carrier backhaul – shared
between the two 4G LTE connections.

If we do SpeedFusion bandwidth bonding on these two 4G LTE SIM cards, with each of the 4G LTE giving roughly
half of 15Mbps, SpeedFusion will bond them to a throughput of 15Mbps.

This 15Mbps bonded throughput will mislead the users to believe that SpeedFusion is not bonding the two 4G LTE
connections.

In fact, if we take into account the fact that the two 4G LTE are constantly nudging each other for more bandwidth in
a fixed bandwidth pool, and we take away the 10-20% bandwidth cost from packet encapsulation, user may see
bonding two 4G LTE gives less bandwidth than using only one 4G LTE i.e. 1 + 1 = 0.9.
Is there a way around this?

Bonding 4G LTE
From our experience,

This bandwidth sharing problem is quite common for 4G LTE from the same mobile carriers. And sometimes we do also
see this problem for 4G LTE from different mobile carriers, especially when they are sharing the backhaul infrastructure.

Be sure to do the parallel speed test above if you suspect that you have fallen a victim of this bandwidth sharing
problem.

A number of 4G LTE mobile carriers also have 4G LTE connection offerings with dedicated or guaranteed bandwidth. These
will be ideal for bandwidth bonding.

And keep in mind that there is a world of connectivity options other than 4G LTE that SpeedFusion can use to boost
bandwidth and increase resiliency.

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