Starlink and Max Transit Duo SLOWer than Starlink by itself ???

Specialized Market Starlink
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46

Been working with Peplink support on this. They did not have a Starlink gen2 dish/router to test with so I have been assisting with my setup. I setup a remote assistance session with their engineering team who spent a few hours trying some things out. They see the packet loss but was unable to determine where it’s coming from. We changed out cables and they gathered logs for analysis.

Their findings:

  1. PING from the Transit Pro-E WAN interface to our device WAN IP (202.190.63.215), we can see the packets sent out successfully, but lost along the path to the destination.
  2. PING from the Transit Pro-E WAN interface to Starlink IP (192.168.100.1), we also see the same packet loss situation as happening in (1) above. It looks like those lost packets went into the “black hole”.
  3. From the Transit Pro-E, Engineering Team sees all the packets handled out (forwarded ) from the WAN interface without error or drop at the driver level, thus, we can safely conclude there aren’t any issues within the router OS.
  4. It looks like it is a compatibility issue between the Ethernet chipset (Transit Pro-E) and USB-to-Ethernet chipset (Starlink ETH Adapter), as we tried to adjust some parameters at the Transit Pro-E WAN ethernet driver but the result is the same.
  5. Moving forward, for testing purposes, we would like to try to build a special firmware that uses a newer Ethernet chipset driver, to see if that could change the behavior or overcome the compatibility issue. Target it shall be ready in a day or two.

They got back to me after a few days and sent me this special firmware. But after installing it, it did not appear to help resolve any issues and still have a very high packet loss.

Their latest response on my ticket is:
Currently, we have a few preliminary ideas that we are discussing internally, so I foresee we shall be able to come back to you with an update early next week. Please bear with us a little bit more while.

Support has been really good with their updates and great to work with. Hope they can figure out what is going on.

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