Hi,
We just bought a house with a Peplink Balance 20 connected to the house’s wired and wireless LAN. It also had a TWN microwave modem connected to it (maximum 4Mbs downlink speed). We ordered and got a Starlink dish, etc.
Ideally, I want the Starlink as primary with the TWN as a real-time backup to the Starlink.
I am not an IT expert and I have not found anything which addresses this situation. Perhaps, I won’t be able to “bond” or whatever the correct term is. I don’t need the extra bandwidth the TWN WAN provides but it would be great if it could take over when the Starlink drops out (as it frequently does).
Any ideas, or threads (I searched and could not find any on point) would be greatly appreciated.
tons and tons and tons of information on this. have you done any research?
look at speedfusion hot failover.
The type of setup would depend on whether you want to have hitless failover between the links where sessions such as video/voice calls would not drop, or if you are happy with a bit of disruption and just need the Peplink to switch between the Starlink and TWN connection depending on what is available.
In the former you would need to use SpeedFusion / PepVPN where your traffic is tunneled via the VPN, the VPN would be established over both your Starlink and TWN connections back to a hub, if one connections stops working the other takes over. Because your tarffic to/from the internet is seen to be coming from the hub no matter what WAN is in use most services such as video/voice calls will not drop their connection to you.
You have a couple of choices too now in terms of how to implement SF/PepVPN for this.
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SpeedFusion Cloud - this is a service run by Peplink, you prepay for data transfer and the setup is pretty straight forward. Basically activate a SFC Plan, in the Peplink GUI you can then select an SFC hub location and there are some wizards to help you decide what traffic to send to the hub.
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FusionHub - this is where you would host and maintain the hub yourself. It still has costs associated as you need to pay to host the hub in the cloud, somewhere like DigitalOcean or Vultr but the licence for the hub itself is free for a single Peplink to connect in. This is a bit more involved, you have to setup the hub yourself and maintain it but it does give you some more control and capabilities that SFC does not.
If you just want simple failover though and don’t mind if things may drop or need to reconnect then you can configure this quite simply by setting the WAN for Starlink to priority 1 and then set the WAN for the TWN link to priority 2.
After that an outbound policy could be used to further nail down how traffic failover is handled - you could for example specify that only certain devices (normally by matching their IP addresses in a policy) get to use the TWN link as it has much lower bandwidth.
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Dear Mystery,
Yes, I did. Would you be so kind to give me a link to what you believe is on point since I wasn’t able to find anything that could be understood.
Will,
Thanks this was quite helpful. One question I have is how long is the time between a drop by the Starlink and a pick-up by TWN connection? Most Starlink drops are short but can be annoying. The SpeedFusion would make sense iff the time to fall over is longer than a typical drop (15 seconds currently). I do get drops up to 65 seconds and those I expect to improve as Starling deploys more satellites.
Kindest Regards,
Kevin