Starlink is a satellite internet service developed and operated by SpaceX, a private American aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company founded by Elon Musk. The service aims to provide high-speed internet access to remote or underserved areas around the world by using a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites.
The company has launched several batches of satellites into orbit since 2019, with the goal of eventually having thousands of satellites in its constellation. Their aim is to provide internet speeds of around 100 megabits per second (Mbps) with latency of around 20 milliseconds. This is significantly faster than current satellite internet services, which can have latency in the hundreds of milliseconds and speeds of around 25 Mbps. However, just like with cellular connections, throughput and latency are not guaranteed.
So, you may be wondering, how might you make your Starlink connection more reliable? Enter Peplink SpeedFusion Connect (SFC). Peplink is a company that specializes in developing networking solutions for businesses and organizations. They offer a range of products, including routers and other networking devices, that can help connect computers, devices, and networks together. Their SpeedFusion technology runs just like a VPN tunnel. It is used to combine multiple Internet connections together to create a single, fast, and reliable connection for use with a Peplink router.
The goal of SpeedFusion is to provide a way for users to improve the performance and reliability of their Internet connection by using multiple connections from different providers, such as broadband, cellular, and satellite. SpeedFusion can be used to load balance traffic across multiple connections, seamlessly failover to a secondary connection in the event of an outage, and bond connections for more bandwidth, all while providing improved security and privacy through the use of encryption.
Seeing that cellular and satellite connections can be sporadic and unreliable on their own, Peplink technology helps them to behave more like wired services. Congestion on the network and latency spikes are the biggest factors to consider with wireless services. Ways to mitigate these issues include increasing the number of WAN connections that you are using. Though, even if you are only using two WANs, there are still ways that the Peplink SpeedFusion can be configured to improve performance.
Here are some tips:
- Avoid bonding multiple Starlink connections together as this could create more issues with performance.
- Important part of the SFC connection is how to get it connected and how to route your traffic
- The default configuration is already optimized for best performance, but it is a matter of making changes to the WAN connection priority. This is what controls whether the SFC tunnel runs with just Hot Failover between connections, or bonds them.
- With connections in different priorities, you have Hot Failover. With connections all in priority 1, you have bonding. This is what allows you to have connections active simultaneously so that bandwidth can be bonded and real time/ mission critical traffic can be routed over this connection.
- If you would like to have the benefits of both Hot Failover and bonding, simply create sub tunnels (i.e. one for Hot Failover and one for Dynamic Weighted Bonding).
- To get the traffic routed as needed, this is where the outbound policy comes into play. This can be done at the local admin page or through InControl 2.
- The big difference is that SaaS is only possible via InControl 2.
- Add more redundancy by using the priority algorithm and prioritize your tunnels
- Use your Dynamic Weighted Bonding tunnel to protect your real time traffic. Route regular traffic over single WAN with hot failover tunnel.
- Local configuration is the same as on InControl 2, but does NOT support SaaS or regional based routing.
- Use WAN smoothing over Dynamic Weighted Bonding when seeing high packet loss. Otherwise Dynamic Weighted Bonding can be more helpful without increasing your data usage.
- Firmware: Upgrade to version 8.3.0 to use TCP Ramp up. This improves the handling of Upload/ Download TCP traffic, which is important because Starlink uses TCP acceleration. This also helps with congested LTE networks. It is the initial duplication of traffic and allows for more bandwidth.
- If Starlink goes up and down, elongate the health check interval.
- MTU for Starlink is 1500.
Have more questions about using Starlink and Peplink together? Reach out to our team via phone, email, or chat!
