SFC WAN Smoothing

Hi all,
I’ve been using SFC in an attempt to resolve my packet loss issues with Starlink as my primary WAN (a more reliable but speed throttled and data limited LTE connection as WAN 2)

I setup the SFC with only one tunnel and enabled WAN Smoothing (Normal) and FEC (Low). I then routed all traffic from the computer I stream on through to the SFC.

Despite this, I’ve still been running into dropout issues on calls, so today during a meeting I investigated the actual usage of my two WAN connections. I saw that despite the WAN smoothing setting, only the Starlink connection was actually being used.

This led me back to the SFC configuration and I noticed that I had set a lower priority for the secondary connection. I have now changed them to be equal priority and I can see they are actively consuming the same or similar amount of bandwidth as each other.

My questions:

  • Can anyone confirm that setting a lower priority for the secondary WAN connection effectively overrides the WAN smoothing settings and causes it to become more of a failover setup?

  • Does it make sense to enable both WAN Smoothing and FEC on my streaming tunnel? Is it worth the extra data consumption to use both? How does one choose between Normal, Medium, High - are the 2x, 3x, 4x modifiers representative of the number of connections you are hoping to use redundantly?

  • So far, I’ve found no good way to route traffic for Slack, Zoom, and Teams for the whole network. I do see the ‘optimize cloud application’ but this doesn’t mean it will route ALL network traffic to these apps, correct? Only the devices that have been selected on the “Connect Clients to Cloud”. I guess I am going to likely need multiple SFC tunnels in order to utilize this the way it was intended? (And sadly, Slack doesn’t seem to exist on the list of preset app traffic types - any chance we could get this added?).

thanks all

For Teams, I have an outbound policy that pushes UDP traffic 3478 - 3481 to SFC Cloud.

Rightly or wrongly, I have medium smoothing, low FEC & a 50ms buffer set for that specific sub-tunnel.

This seems to work well for me. (I can observe traffic heading over SFC when I am in a call).

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