Bonding & encoders
Which mode do I use — Hot Failover, WAN Smoothing, or Bandwidth Bonding?
Use bandwidth bonding to add throughput for file/ISO transfer, WAN smoothing (packet duplication) for the live program feed to kill jitter and loss, and hot failover when you need a guaranteed always-up path. The best rigs combine them with sub-tunnels: bond for bulk, a smoothed sub-tunnel for the on-air feed.
What encoder settings work best?
Set the encoder to a constant bitrate comfortably below your measured reliable bonded floor so smoothing/FEC overhead has headroom — roughly 8–15 Mbps for 1080p60 contribution, 25–50 Mbps for 4K. Let SpeedFusion carry the transport and keep the encoder’s own error resilience on.
Latency, jitter, and packet-loss recovery in a packed stadium?
In high-contention RF you lean on carrier diversity plus WAN smoothing and FEC: you trade a few tens of milliseconds of tunnel latency for a feed that doesn’t break up. SpeedFusion recovers loss across paths without the retransmit stalls that make an encoder buffer.
Routing multiple feeds
How do I route multi-camera, return feed, tally, and comms separately?
Put each traffic class on its own VLAN and steer it with outbound policy / sub-tunnels: program on the smoothed path, comms and tally on a low-latency path, ISO/bulk on bonding. Layer-2 VLAN over SpeedFusion extends your production LAN out to the truck or REMO so gear shares one subnet.
Does it work with LiveU / TVU / my existing encoder?
Yes — Peplink is transport-agnostic. Put the encoder or bonded unit behind the router and let SpeedFusion be the resilient pipe; L2 bridging makes remote gear appear on the production core’s subnet.
How is this different from a bonded cellular backpack?
A backpack is a self-contained single uplink for ENG. Peplink SD-WAN adds multiple transport types at once (fiber + 5G + Starlink), VLANs and return feeds, and full site networking — it’s the whole production network, not just the uplink.
Deployment & monitoring
Antenna and power best practices for fast setups?
MAX MIMO/paddle antennas or roof/mast mounts, with cellular antennas separated by carrier for diversity, and PoE plus battery/inverter for power. Pre-staged kits come up configured the moment they’re powered.
During a live show, what does “good” look like on the graphs?
In the SpeedFusion status graph you want steady per-WAN contribution, stable latency, and any loss/out-of-order being absorbed rather than reaching the feed. Watch for a WAN flapping in and out — InControl will alert you the moment a path drops.
The encoder starts buffering when one path degrades — what do I check?
Check per-path WAN quality and loss, raise the smoothing level or add FEC, and lower the encoder bitrate to restore headroom. Confirm no single carrier is saturated, then use WAN Analysis to certify the recovered pipe.
What kit for each production scale?
Single-camera ENG: a BR2 Pro or MBX-class unit. Multi-cam REMO: a 580X/EPX core with MAX antennas and 6–8 WANs. Large event: pair it with a bonding hub back at the broadcast center.
Still have a question? Talk to a West Networks engineer — we design and NOC-manage these networks every day. Want the deeper theory? See Peplink University.