I have noticed some strange behavior recently with my Max BR1 Pro 5g connected via WAN to Starlink. It started after the 8.5 firmware, I believe. The problem was first noticed when my girlfriends laptop, connecting to the router via wifi. The starlink routing goes through Denver Co and shows as starlink. Suddenly the routing began to go through other locations. Web sites like indeed, walmart, amazon started checking for human interfacing and flagging my accounts for fraud and bots. When doing a simple "what is my ip’ the result was showing as several different locations including toronto Ca, Europe, and Arizona.
After some troubleshooting i realized that the router was forwarding through VPN connections similar to the speedfusion, but speedfusion is not setup. When I force the connection using outbound policy set to enforce traffic to WAN, the behavior stops. I am currently using a modified firmware from Peplink because I control a switch via the router, and the current 8.5.3 firmware broke the switch management. Go Peplink!
Has anyone else noticed anything similar to what I have seen.
I had similar issues with my grand-nephew and latency on his gaming machine. After a lot of debugging, we worked out it was his PC had Norton Firewall on by default, and it was routing the traffic via Texas (killed his latency, cue howls of anguish).
Before finding how to turn it off on the PC, I could deny connections to the VPN server (with a firewall rule I think), and the issue went away.
The router’s Status>Active Sessions status is really handy for finding what the client is connecting to.
I have several VPN options myself. One is with Bitdefender Antivirus and another through AirVPN that I use to create open ports back from the wild to my server for personal web pages. Both of these are disabled. After reading your input I double checked just to be safe that I didn’t miss something. In my case I can control the flow of traffic through the VPN connection by using outbound polices on my router. If I enforce traffic through the WAN → Starlink connection, then I have no issues. If I do not force traffic through the WAN and let the traffic policies cascade downward through the outbound policy decision process, then I see traffic being forwarded to the VPN’s.