Question Are you using Pepwave SpeedFusion?

[lemondrop9344]

I am concerned the speed hit this may take. Will be interested testing when I hit the road.

Neal,
As a FYI........
I have been performing a Synology NAS server backup (incremental) from our home office to the Synology NAS on my RV for over a year using SpeedFusion with PEP VPN.
First off, I think the Synology NAS backup apps do a pretty good job of compressing the files to be backed up & secondly, Speed Fusion does a good job of getting the files from one NAS to the other. While the initial backup took some time (an hour or so), the incremental backups rarely take more than a minute.
Granted, there are a lot of things in play that would/could impact the time it takes for the backup to happen, but from my perspective, transfer speeds were more than acceptable.

 

[Neal]

It's going to be interesting to test and Peplink has great tools per the video I posted to be able to disable select WAN connections to see how speeds are on each WAN. Do I sacrifice a 90-150 down single WAN for a 30 down bonded WAN via Speedfusion? My speed tests via InControl are showing about 20-30 down which are quite slow from what I've seen. I won't know more until I'm in the coach and testing over time. There may be a hit by the InControl remote connection too. By the way, InControl is seriously cool and very well done. I haven't really used it in the past but I will likely renew going forward and maintain it.

 

[redbaron]

I have discovered that wan smoothing kills the bandwidth too much. I have eliminated that setting and things are much faster.

 

[Neal]

Mine is off which is the default it appears as I'm using stock settings other than the dynamic bonding option. No real data from me until I get Verizon back in the Pepwave and see how things work on the road.

I'm curious of your raw speeds vs. Speedfusion speeds. I expect going through a VPN, much less an additional hop(s) to go through FusionHub is going to have a speed penalty. Question is how much and is it worth it?

 

[redbaron]

I added 3 sources each have approx 100Mb/s
I have seen speeds as low as 60, and high as 240Mb/s.

What has been perfect is my zoom calls, RDP and Citrix sessions and overall connectivity.

 

[Neal]

I figured the benefit, one of several, would be to not have to see who's the fastest and be switching WAN's. Haven't always been impressed with all in priority 1 as I don't think Pepwave discards the first hop which is Ethernet to pepwave 2 so it always wins.

 

[redbaron]

One more thing: the speedfusion cloud is too expensive for streaming video, and is worthless for RV usage.

Fusionhub is the right solution for the technical person.

 

[redbaron]

I figured the benefit, one of several, would be to not have to see who's the fastest and be switching WAN's. Haven't always been impressed with all in priority 1 as I don't think Pepwave discards the first hop which is Ethernet to pepwave 2 so it always wins.

Agreed. I now have TMobile in the Peplink, an att M5 on the Ethernet and my parks wifi on the 5ghz wifi.

Sidenote: this park will aggressively knock on doors when the find a wifi ranger or Winegard connect SSID broadcasting.

When I checked in, they told me that all newmars have a wifi ranger and that it must be turned off.

Of course that's not a problem for me, but I found it funny that more parks are taking that aggressive approach.

This park also has a 5Ghz network using Ubiquiti and seems to have those fed with fiber. Done really well.

My guess is the tech doing the install got upset with the noise pollution WFR creates. Luckily it's mainly on the 2.4Ghz spectrum and we can just avoid it.

 

[Neal]

I went to my coach today to check a few things in prep for my upcoming trip and also to put my Verizon sim in Pep2 and test the Pepfusion/FusionHub situation. As I did a test of my IP address I noticed it was showing that of the AT&T cellular SIM. So the question comes to mind, how do I know traffic is going to/through FusionHub?

From a google search it appears only if you're communicating with your FusionHub destination, that Network I presume, are you routed through FusionHub. For example if I'm going to connect into my servers for whatever need. For Internet browsing you're not going through FusionHub. UNLESS you check the option Advanced > Speefusion "Send all traffic to"

https://knowhow.peplink.ninja/documentation/pepvpn-speedfusion/configuring-pepvpn-speedfusion-profiles/

Send all traffic to remote Hub

By default, only traffic that is destined for the remote hub will use the PepVPN /SpeedFusion tunnel. Other traffic, like internet browsing, will be routed directly to the internet, not via the remote hub.
When this option is selected, all traffic will be sent through the PepVPN / SpeedFusion tunnel.

@redbaron how do you have yours configured? I'm trying to figure out if I should have this option enabled or not and pro's/con's if so.

 

[redbaron]

I am using FusionHub first of all, because I want 100% of all my traffic going thru this. This differs from SpeedFusion in that I am providing the Datacenter connection for my RV.

This is what the connection looks like under advanced->speedfusion

So the way I handle traffic is thru the Policy.

Advanced -> Outbound Policy

This is what my policy looks like.

The first policy says that if I am using a SoftEtherVPN -- skip speed fusion. I do this for comparison of speeds on the provider vs going direct, and also when I need to alter my IP address for outbound reasons.

All other traffic, being IoT, laptops, guests, etc goes thru the SpeedFusion.

That custom policy looks like this:

In my InControl2 page, I can then control the fusion hub.

Depending on my physical location, I choose which fusion hub I want to connect to. As shown, I have 3 FusionHubs right now, located in Dallas, New Brunswick, and Seattle. The GPS is wrong for my Seattle location. I plan on adding another in Chicago and Denver, with the goal of being within 500 miles of my fusionhub at all times. This will minimize latency.