8 Mbps Peplink ADSL bonding tested
Last week Nology announced its new range of Peplink routers that are capable of, among other things, line bonding and load balancing.
Bonding multiple lines isn’t a trivial exercise, so we were most curious to see how easily one would be able to “do it yourself” with a Peplink router.
The routers are configured through a standard web interface – if you can set up a normal ADSL router then you’ll be able to do a basic configuration of a Peplink router.
The product range includes devices that can link from 2 up to 13 ethernet Wide Area Network (WAN) links from multiple ISPs. Nology said that any type of WAN link can be aggregated with the routers, including ADSL, iBurst, WiMAX and 3G.
Most of the routers also feature support for USB 3G modems that can be configured for failover in the event that the other WAN links go down.
Line bonding
To show off the line bonding capabilities Nology had to install another Peplink router at a data centre where it was connected it to a high bandwidth connection.
In order to create a bonded link between two Peplink routers you input the serial number as well as address of the router you’d like to establish the link with.
Multiple addresses can also be provided, that way if links become unavailable the routers are still able to bond as long as one remains active. The addresses can be Internet Protocol addresses (IPs) or domain names.
The routers also support a number of dynamic DNS services, including DynDNS.
Nology said that they are busy working on firmware that includes support for South African dynamic DNS services. They said that this was done for clients who wanted to use only local bandwidth to connect two sites without needing a static IP.
Because of the way line bonding works, this means one won’t be able to buy a Peplink router, connect two or three ADSL lines to it and perform single-threaded downloads at 12 Megabits per second (Mbps). The routers that supported site-to-site bonding were really designed to connect multiple company sites together using multiple, potentially heterogenous, WAN connections.
The bonding only works from site-to-site where one has a Peplink device on either end and Nology also said that users will be looking at around a 10% overhead on the bonded connection. This means that 12 Mbps bonded ADSL would get download speeds of around 10.8 Mbps.
To see if the routers were truly bonding the links, we performed some Ookla speed tests and normal HTTP downloads without the assistance of a download manager.
For the purposes of the test two 4 Mbps ADSL links were used as 10 Mbps lines from Telkom were not available at the test site. Two uncapped ADSL accounts from Internet Solutions were used.
Speed tests to local servers yielded positive results. The routers were able to push the lines to around 6.5 – 7 Mbps download and between 768 and 820 kbps upload.
Single threaded downloads from international sites yielded average speeds of around 780 KBps (or 6.1 Mbps).
Load balancing
While line bonding can give you the speed of multiple links in a single session, proper load balancing can give you those speeds over multiple sessions.
Load balancing is fairly easy to configure using the web interface on the Peplink device and can be done without connecting it to a second router.
To test this we used a download manager to download a file over a standard HTTP connection. This yielded around the same speeds as when the download was single-threaded over a bonded connection.
Unlike the HTTP test, BitTorrent didn’t yield as promising results. Some of the more popular torrents downloaded slightly faster than over a single ADSL connection (around 520 KBps, just over 4 Mbps) but not near the theoretical maximum limit of the two lines combined.
As the downloads were happening during office hours, the explanation was that the BitTorrent traffic was being shaped.
Choosing the right account from the right ISP to suit your needs is the most difficult part of using the router.
Price
The cheapest Peplink routers are only capable of load balancing and not site-to-site bonding.
There’s quite a dramatic jump in price between routers that support bonding and those that don’t.
Recommended retail pricing is given exclusive of VAT as the products are targeted more toward businesses than consumers.
- Balance 20 (load balancing only, 2 ethernet WAN ports, USB 3G modem support): R3 999
- Balance 30 (load balancing only, 3 ethernet WAN ports, USB 3G modem support): R4 999
- Balance 210 (bonding and balancing, 2 ethernet WAN ports): R12 999
- Balance 310 (bonding and balancing, 3 ethernetWAN ports): R14 999
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