4g LTE packet Loss
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Hi,
Can anybody advise on some sensible settings for 4G LTE gateway monitoring values to take account of congestion?
I have just had to deploy a backup LTE WAN connection due to the primary VDSL link for the site being down and it could potentially being down for up to 5 days. This is because of copper cable theft here in the UK.
The connection is using a Teltonika trb140 in bridge mode. I think the Signal strength was about 69db.
The 4G connection is on the three UK network.
The problem is that this outage involves a large area with thousands of homes and business without internet access.
I think I am getting very high latency and packet loss because the cell tower is getting congested, that in turn is causing pfSense to drop the link.
If I change the values under advanced settings any suggestions what would be good starting values to increase the defaults from?
I was seeing high latency and packet loss of about 40 -50 % before the connection dropped. Not sure on the latency values but I think it could have been as high as 800ms.
Over the weekend it has remained stable as far as I can tell. I am unable to check the exact values as I am not onsite and I do not have VPN access over this link currently.
I suspect that on Monday if the primary link has not be reconnected then the same situation will arise since this area is a large industrial site with many businesses and units.
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@dlucas46 Since you only have the one link for the time being maybe select Disable Gateway Monitoring Action and just suffer with the congestion.
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If I disable gateway monitoring what will it do to gateway failover?
I have this LTE link configured as a Tier 2 member and the primary as Tier 1 with Member down failover.
I thought if the gateway detection was disabled then it would stop gateway groups from working correctly.
When I set it up the other day it was basically link flapping because of the latency.
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@dlucas46 I assumed you weren't using a Gateway Group at the moment because you only have one working WAN. I suggest not using the Gateway Group for now and setting your default route to the LTE gateway(s) until the primary link returns.
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You could set the values very high since the other WAN is 100% down. So, for example, 1000ms latency and 80% packet loss. Really though you should tune the values to your connection. That's difficult to do if the cell is in very high use but you just want to avoid false alarms whilst still alerting if it goes down entirely.
Steve
