Starlink + 4G/5G with Wan-Smoothing and/or FEC

KPS-ps · February 1, 2025, 5:20pm

Hi!

I am using Starlink as main WAN + additonal 4G/5G for the first installations. I am expecting some packet loss, that I want to get rid off. It’s mostly VoIP, RDP and print jobs on the Speedfusion tunnel.

I read some white papers, posts, etc. about FEC and WAN-Smoothing, but I am still not really in the position to fully understand, what is best for my setup:

Wan-Smoothing:
What happens, if I activate WAN-smoothing and the 4G/5G-connections bandwith drops down? Does this also take down the bandwith of the Speedfusion tunnel? As every packet would be duplicated, how does the tunnel handle the congestions of one WAN? Is it possible to define thresholds?

FEC:
Would you use FEC or WAN-Smoothing to take down the packet loss? What is your “default-setup”?

Thank you and best wishes

MarceloBarros · February 1, 2025, 10:58pm

Hi, @KPS-ps
I have a customer with a huge VoIP, build with TST-DUO-LTEA (old)
Wan-Smoothing is off and FEC is enable.
It is working nice.

FEC: LOW
Receive Buffer: 50ms
Both sides… bpl-305 at headquarter and tst-duo at remote site.

I only enable Wan-Smoothing, when I see a huge lost of packets… and set wan-smoothing to Normal. (when the device are only working under lte connections)
Normal - The total bandwidth consumption will be at most 2x of the original data traffic.