dual WAN, starlink and comcast … best practices?
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Port 1: WAN/Comcast-"business"
Port 2: LAN/internal
Port 3: WAN2/StarlinkI left 1, 2 alone so if I do a factory reset I don't need to pull wires. Failover works exactly as one would expect. But there's no obvious load balancing going on. Of course, NOW Comcast is behaving, and is faster than starlink so not much traffic should go there ;>
Are there any good known / best practices for combing these two? Traffic shaping, load balancing, or ?
Also, disabling WAN1 doesn't seem to have the same effect as a wire pull ... whats the best software way to simulate WAN1 down?
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@khb
Best on my experience, Starlink is a pure Internet connection only and even if you have up to 300mbps of download speed of Starlink the upload speed is less than 30mbps only, not like fiber connections are 1 is to 1 speed for download and upload. For my configuration in the routing, I put Tear 1 for WAN and Tear 2 for WAN2, that configuration is good for LoadBalance FailOver. Thank you -
@chris-doldolia thank you. Before reading your note I'd gone ahead and setup a gateway group, putting both on Tier 1, and set both the default LAN rules (up+down) to use that gateway group. I now see peak speeds of 2x (600odd mbps down and 300odd mbps up).
Based on your advice I'll try making starlink tier2, but even with it "on par" with Comcast (we can't get fiber here in the Village :<) the results are quite good.
For anyone interested, now that I have an explicit gateway group, enable/disable a WAN now works as I'd expected.
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@khb did you try the speed test alone the Starlink? If the bandwidth is higher when you connect stand-alone may be due to the configuration of your rules. Thank you
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@chris-doldolia yes. Alone my starlink download speed peak was a bit under 300mbps (usually lower, but I'm not motivated enough to run hundreds of runs across a few days and compute real statistics ;>). Download peak was about 150 (again, usually slower). Even the worst case starlink hasn't been observed to be too bad). And mostly our workload is dominated by video streaming (with various package and ISO downloads sometimes providing challenges). If/when I go back to having enough video conferences to justify special rules, I might want to steer those to Comcast (of course, Comcast unreliability is why we got a starlink ;>). Our comcast performance peaks at about 300/300 (paying for business grade service). But typically the Comcast upload is significantly slower ... so sometimes starlink is ahead, but Comcast is usually ahead.
I set the gateway group rule to {packetloss|high latency} which probably favors Comcast (their latency is typically significantly lower than starlink). What those precise values are isn't obvious to me (but no doubt documented somewhere in the FM!)
Rereading your last response, I've never seen the group result being worse than the starlink standalone ... and disabling Comcast and using only the gateway group the results are a wash with connecting directly (except for latency .. the starlink speedtest removes some of my LAN internal hops, or at least that's the most obvious explanation for what I observe).
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I'm seeing better download performance with priority 1/1 .. but upload improves with 2/1 (possibly even better at 3/1 but I haven't run enough tests to have any confidence). Is there a way to have differing priorities based on direction as well as gateway itself?