Starlink

I'm wondering if there's something you can do on the routing side; sadly I'm thinking of something along the lines of using a VPC or some such to run traffic through where you have parallel pipes between endpoints, and traffic goes whichever way is fastest, but then I realized that I'm describing 'the internet'...

Feels like a live 'failover' isn't what you need as much as a 'dual-WAN' setup. Not sure where to start on such a thing myself, and whether it can be done in EdgeOS or not, but perhaps take a look around?
 
Brian_B said:
It's a mixed bag, to be honest.

The speed is - fantastic. Being able to watch a 4K streaming movie is wonderful. Not having to wait all weekend for a new game to download is awesome.

But...

The drop outs are hella annoying. You don't really realize how important a steady connection is until you have to deal with one that isn't.

Thankfully, we hadn't canceled our DSL service. My work pays for our home internet, and I'm paying for the backup, which helps out.

I did program fallover on the Edgerouter - that doesn't really help. The outages are short enough that it might flip over, then flip right back... and anything that was streaming live gets disconnected twice in a row that way. I moved the switchover time out longer (1 min, or 6 consecutive ping losses over 10 sec), it almost never flips over now. I am guessing that switching between satellites something (maybe it's Windows, maybe the router, maybe the dish, idk) sees it as a total loss of internet, and then when it reconnects it resets the connection.

Apart from that, it's great, but that's a pretty big annoyance with the service right now. It's better than nothing, that's for sure. But until that issue gest fixed, it wouldn't necessarily be my first or only choice.

I was hoping that it was something dumb on my end and it would be an easy fix, but SpaceX has more or less confirmed it isn't. So now I'm hoping satellite density will cure the problem.
Click to expand...
Biggest problem you're going to have with the auto-failover, is that the gateway of the Internet connection changes, and that is what causes all your sockets to terminate when live streaming (Zoom / OBS / Games). Since you're maintaining both the DSL and Starlink, it is possible to prioritize the Zoom traffic over the DSL line so that you never lose the connection, and then prioritize other streaming services (primarily download related) over the Starlink connection.
 
LazyGamer said:
I'm wondering if there's something you can do on the routing side; sadly I'm thinking of something along the lines of using a VPC or some such to run traffic through where you have parallel pipes between endpoints, and traffic goes whichever way is fastest, but then I realized that I'm describing 'the internet'...

Feels like a live 'failover' isn't what you need as much as a 'dual-WAN' setup. Not sure where to start on such a thing myself, and whether it can be done in EdgeOS or not, but perhaps take a look around?
Click to expand...
Exactly what I was thinking.. Instead of Failover, run the connections in parallel.
 
Space_Ranger said:
Since you're maintaining both the DSL and Starlink, it is possible to prioritize the Zoom traffic over the DSL line so that you never lose the connection, and then prioritize other streaming services (primarily download related) over the Starlink connection.
Click to expand...
Wonder if some fancy QoS would allow for that?
 
Great ideas. I’m not a network guru but will do some snifffing around

I know I can do parallel because I tried it out. I just don’t know if I can discriminate and distribute the traffic or not
 
Did some digging

Looks like this is about as good as it gets:
help.ui.com

EdgeRouter - Policy-Based Routing

Overview Readers will learn how to configure Policy-Based Routing (PBR) on an EdgeRouter. NOTES & REQUIREMENTS: Applicable to the latest EdgeOS firmw...
help.ui.com help.ui.com

According to this, I would create two VLANs, one for each ISP. I would then need to discriminate at the device level. The two VLANs could still see each other on the LAN though (which is essential, for all those "smart" things we have around the house).

That doesn't exactly fix the problem, as my gaming PC needs to kind of switch back and forth - fast download speeds for patching, reliable service for playing. Although maybe I could dual-nic the Windows PC, except I seem to recall Windows doesn't really deal with that very well either - it's more like a fail over.

Maybe someone more network saavy than me can take a look at that and see that with just a couple small tweaks it could be made to do something more efficient. I am not that person.

Right now I'm just manually switching it back and forth. I tried leaving it set to dual ISP, the traffic does funky things though - like a game will log in on a client manager / front end, then when you launch the game, it will sometimes kick over to the other ISP and give authentication issues. Or movies will just decide to start streaming on the slower ISP because the latency is a bit lower...

It might be possible to direct based on DNS, but that would be tricky, and require a lot of manually creating a DNS filter to apply. I saw a couple of posts talking about that, but nothing as clear cut as the link above.

Right now the big debate is do I jump into the VLAN route, and do something like put my phone and work laptop on the DSL (for calls), dual-nic the gaming PC and still manually select between that depending on what I'm doing there... or do I just wait and hope the situation gets better.

The deciding factor will probably be if I get a bored drunk weekend to play with it or not.
 
Well, one other thing to consider is to look outside Ubiquiti. I'd be hesitant myself as I love my Edgerouter 4, but I know others may do it better.
 
I did find "Sticky" setting, which ~almost~ does what is needed. It locks an IP or port to a single interface, keeping it from bouncing back and forth - which would fix the "log in one place, then get deauthenticated when traffic bounces" problem.

The issue with the Edgerouter is that, I don't know that i can lock it to a specific interface - it still appears to be first come first serve. More digging needed.

Supposedly I can do something with firewall rules as well. I'm definitely not a firewall expert, so more digging needed there too.

Also, looking at other devices - good call, will do some research there.
 
I know ith the SonicWall routers, you can funnel specific traffic to specific interfaces on the firewall. That how I do it at the office..
 
Brian_B said:
I did find "Sticky" setting, which ~almost~ does what is needed. It locks an IP or port to a single interface, keeping it from bouncing back and forth - which would fix the "log in one place, then get deauthenticated when traffic bounces" problem.

The issue with the Edgerouter is that, I don't know that i can lock it to a specific interface - it still appears to be first come first serve. More digging needed.

Supposedly I can do something with firewall rules as well. I'm definitely not a firewall expert, so more digging needed there too.

Also, looking at other devices - good call, will do some research there.
Click to expand...
Kinda got something kludged that works for the most part. It still requires a bit of manual finagling from time to time, but seems to work more often than not, and it's less annoying than constant disconnections.

Taking a que from @LazyGamer and @Space_Ranger - I disabled the failover, and left the connections in parallel. I enabled Sticky settings -- that way when a connection starts on a WAN, it stays on that WAN until the connection resets. Then I set the Weight of each WAN connection -- I default it to Starlink 100, DSL 10, so it roughly splits the traffic 10:1 (which roughly matches the difference in bandwidth). If I see that a game or VOIP has started on the wrong interface, I can flip the weights and restart the game/app/call.

I think I can play with Firewall rules from there to force specific traffic to one interface or the other, and that may make it even more resilient. If I get some time to fool with it...

Not perfect, but until there are enough satellites I think it will work. It works without any adjustment maybe 3 out of 4 attempts, and adjusting the weight does not involve a router reset/reboot, so nothing else hiccups.
 
Summer update -

The disconnections are better - they still occur, but rather than occurring every 5-10 minutes, it’s maybe two or three times a day.

So there has been much improvement made. You can actually game and VOIP on the service with a decent chance of not getting interrupted. It’s still not wired, but it was never going to be.

Supposedly we won’t have full satellite coverage until sometime in August.

Also, this was posted today:

mashable.com

Starlink to improve latency for competitive online gaming, Musk says

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk plans to reduce the latency on Starlink, the company's satellite internet network, to under 20 milliseconds.
mashable.com mashable.com

Latency hasn’t been a huge issue for me, I don’t competitively game, and the service dropouts getting corrected were much more important than shaving ~10ms off the average latency.
 
I will also say: with the latest heat wave out west, we had a streak of a few days hitting triple digits. We topped out at 103F — at least to that temp, up on a gray asphalt shingle roof in direct sun - no issues with the temp.

That’s still a good ways off from what some folks can hit temp wise, but that’s the data point I have.
 
Pretty sweet! I recently took a road trip and my sirius/xm sat radio was cutting out constantly... 90% blue sky with just a random cloud here and there kicking it's azz. That Skylink can offer usable internet from freaking space and it doesn't completely suck (cough Hughesnet cough) is pretty amazing.
 
So checking back in - probably my last barring anything significant.

Service has been pretty stable. The random dropout issue much improved - still occurs but fairly infrequent - maybe once or twice a day for a few seconds, as opposed to hourly.

Speeds still about the same - will cap out at 300+ down, but probably averages closer to 70-80. Latency about the same as before as well. Not really and changes there since last update.

As before, all through summer - no issues with heat at all. The 103 was about where we topped out here for the year.

I can report on inclement weather now. Clouds are no problem. Rain is no issue, the unit works just fine in heavy rain. We haven't had crazy wind, but moderate wind hasn't been an issue at all. Just had 6" of snow - it did drop for a bit when the snow first started, but after a couple of hours it was able to reconnect with sporadic service, which improved as it cleared the snow from itself - I didn't go up and do anything to it. So I can report it does self-heat enough to be able to work through moderate snow cover.
 
Thank you for the update @Brian_B ! I'm still waiting for availability if my area. Was supposed to be ready in May, and still isn't ready to date. :(
 
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