Hypothetical scenario: I’d like to know how I can bond say 6-10 Starlink units together to get one big fat pipe that can handle data up/downloads, video conferencing, and Netflix-like services, plus standard business applications like O365. Having the business/data usage encrypted would be nice. To make it an even more fantastical scenario, can I have several of these clusters several kilometres apart, connected by fibre, and all bonded together yet again so that if one of the clusters has a sudden downpour and its signal is degraded, we won’t have a complete loss of comms. Think of like an island where you’re running a huge resort, for example, and that the budget is pretty generous. I’d have a pretty capable IT team to manage it once it’s set up.
What sort of connectivity (bandwidth/latency) would we expect? What equipment would be recommended? I’m sure I’ll have other thoughts as this scenario evolves, so I’ll put them in the replies.
Sounds like a plausible option to me. Bonding any underlay transit network should really be fairly standard practice, and the fibre interconnect could probably be facilitated via a switching platform which was dependant upon the grade of network you’d want to run.
Latency/bandwidth is defined on Starlinks website per region if you want those kinds of figures though. As it stands today you can’t get a synchronous service from Starlink, so you’d be looking at approximately about a 4/1 download to upload ratio based on the Starlink i’ve used.
It also depends on whether you’d like to use the speedfusion solution and/or encrypt that data, for upwards of 1gbps, to around 4gbps you’re going to need the big EPX model.
Thanks! So if we were to run say four clusters, you’d just run the Starlinks into a switch at the cluster, then use the SFP/fibre to connect each cluster to the EPX at the centre of the system?
There a quite a few big starlink bonding deployments, this is quite a common scenario & Peplink is the right answer for you, but one thing you need is the “other end”.
In order to maximize starlink performance (look at the Peplink University videos on this on Youtube), you need to create a Speedfusion tunnel that bonds all the links together and put your traffic through that.
The other end of that tunnel needs somewhere reliable to send that traffic- ie it needs reliable internet at twice the speed you want to achieve (the traffic coming in inside the tunnel & then exiting out to the internet.
You could do this in private or public cloud with a Fusionhub (as in datacenters, reliable internet is a given) or another site with high speed, reliable internet (fibre).
You can also do it with Peplink’s hosted Speedfusion Connect but you’ll need to be aware of your usage requirements to ensure you get the correct plan.
Your local Peplink partner can help you get those bits right :).
We’re deploying bonded starlinks (and mixing 5G in) as a service for international enterprises across the US, Canada and Europe. Works very well indeed.
From what I’ve seen Peplink SpeedFusion is very good at this but mixing Starlink and 5G takes some fine tuning to get balanced usage across all the available wans.
I think the biggest thing we learned, is it’s better to load balance general traffic and only bond for reliability the critical usage.
As fun as it is to bond lots of Starlinks together, is there a real use case, probably only to increase an upload speed, but there are other ways to manage that too.
Thanks for the feedback and support, everyone! I’m glad to know we’re not reinventing the wheel with this scenario. Please feel free to continue the conversation!
a few km is not a big separation. i was testing starlink last summer and it didnt work for quite a bit of time due to a nice rainstorm. thankfully had cellular failover.
Hello @nmoloney1968 ,
We have just completed a week with @PeterWest working through combining multiple LEO services using the #Peplink routers and speedfusion; you need the correct router(s) for the project, and you need to look beyond the perceived bandwidth and more towards how the data and the number of simultaneous connections/sessions.
Where in the world are you based, and where in the world do you plan to operate your solution?
You are welcome to contact West Networks about this; his team specialises in big LEO deployments, as seen on the Peplink website.
We have partners covering primarily Australia and New Zealand and connections with Certified Peplink Partners globally. We work with LEO, MEO, and GEO platforms along with Cellular and mobile providers; you are welcome to message us privately to organise a complimentary consultation.
