I am not very technically minded, or more to the point i don’t understand all of the terms used all the time so searching just brings up answers that don’t really help, if anyone could offer a more simplified answer that would be great!
I have a Max Transit Duo Pro and i need to bond 2 Starlink connections which i can do with one wired and one wireless, i will also have a sim card in there for locations where i can get a mobile signal too, so 2-3 connections to bond.
I can see the options for Speedfusion Connect in the online shop and can buy that for my device, but are there any limitations to doing that over having a care plan? Will just having the SFC be what i need to create that bonded connection?
My use case will be using a Yolobox Ultra device that i need to be able to bring in a couple of live video feeds, and then stream those out to the internet, i assume that with SFC bonding being advertised as good for things like video calls etc that it will handle live video streaming no problem at all, providing the available connections being bonded are good enough of course
Apologies to those who know what they are doing and this seeming like a complete beginner question but hopefully it makes sense and someone can help with those answers. The set up of the device etc i should be ok with as there are videos online to follow along with.
never apologise for asking questions. That’s how we learn and everyone starts from not knowing anything.
SFC is Peplink’s hosted bonding service. Its very good and a great way to test and use SpeedFusion Bonding. It’s the right place to start.
I have worked with a lot of streamers in the past, they nearly all make the same mistakes.
They don’t do enough trial runs before an event to test the solution end to end.
When they do test they do it from one place so only get one set of connection characteristics.
They then either fine tune settings so they work best at that location or if it worked well, assume it will at the venue too and then don’t give themselves enough time when they do it for real to iron out any issues.
Every place you stream from when you’re using wireless links will be different. Starlink will behave differently, the cellular connections will have different characteristics, latency, packetloss will all be different. The amount of bandwidth available will be different too.
Speedfusion does as best as it can to cope with all of these variables, but out of the box it is designed to work well for as many different use cases as possible (ie as well for office 365 traffic as it does for broadcast video streaming). You will want to tune for video streaming specifically.
These are the stages:
Physical - make sure starlinks are positioned well - no obstructions, well aligned. make sure you are getting great cellular signal on your cellular links. Add directional antennas to improve signal quality where possible.
Set up bonding. Use Dynamic Weighted Bonding and default settings.
Open up the speedfusion live graphs (Status > Speedfusion > Graph button)
Do a bunch of speed tests and try streaming video.
If all works as expected great - if not, screen grab / export the speedfusion graphs and dump them here and we can look at them and advise config adjustments.
The typical issues you will see are:
Latency spikes on connections (often occurs when you saturate upload bandwidth on a link)
More packetloss than expected on certain links.
less bandwidth than expected on cellular and starlink (especially when at an event where there are lots of smartphones or festivals where everyone brings a starlink now)
bandwidth sharing on starlink terminals (due to contention)
Completely crap connections. A cellular WAN that is performing so badly that trying to use it in the bonded tunnel affects overall performance.
A combination of Latency cut off, FEC, WAN smoothing and WAN priority can mitigate nearly all of these issues, but ultimately you are restricted by what connectivity is available.
What I would say is that if I am doing streaming professionally, or advising others in the best way to do it, I will normally recommend the use of a dedicated hosted FusionHub appliance for the job since SFC is a shared service and you don’t have full end to end control of it, but not everyone needs this which is why you should start with SFC.
Thank you for that. Trial runs from home before are certainly no problem, my work however means i am arriving an hour or two at most before i need to be going live, and time is limited for trials, hopefully i can overcome that issue ok
Generally we are in the middle of nowhere with the likelihood of very limited additional Starlinks in the area, especially being in the UK where it isn’t as popular as the US yet. I don’t think we have ever seen less than around 60 down and 10 up on the starlinks on a bad day, but usually it will be closer to an average of 100 down and 15 up.
Cellular coverage isn’t always great, interesting to know that having poor cellular coverage could affect it, i had assumed it would just ignore that one or use very little of it if there was poor coverage, so removing that from the list of connections in that case would be beneficial if the coverage is poor
We can manage with an occasional temporary loss of quality if something happens to the overall speed / bandwidth, but what i want to stop if the stream cutting out completely as streaming to Facebook & Youtube means we lose all viewers and would have to start a new stream with new links etc
Practice at home, then go to friends houses or drive to a Sainsburys / tescos superstore and park up and practise from there.
I’m also in the UK. we are highly contended here, but as you say less than in other places. The key thing is that bandwidth is highly variable, 25Mbps to 8Mbps upload and then back to 20Mbps in a 30-40s time period is quite usual.
There is an assumption that if you have included cellular in the bonded connection that you want to use it if possible. That assumption drives Speedfusion to try and use it. You can set acceptable signal cut off levels as part of the WAN health check on the dashboard, and then aggressive latency cut off levels in the speedfusion profile which will automatically stop it being used in the Speedfusion connection if the quality is poor.
Session reliability is certainly something speedfusion does very well. If you have a healthy WAN to use, the stream will stay up - so long as you use latency cut off well so that latency doesn’t rise to session time out levels.
With Youtube streaming you’d only see session time outs if you are set to ultra-low-latency mode in youtube studio I think.
Some great info thank you. I do also use Restream as a way of streaming out too, just to help with the bandwidth, so there will usually only be one stream being uploaded from the location and being split afterwards which will hopefully help overall