Engineering Insight: Integrating Starlink and Peplink just works

James is our Senior Infrastructure Engineer, based in Venn’s UK office. He has a background of over a decade’s enterprise experience with Peplink, having worked with them directly as a support engineer and has worked on enterprise network design and integration for the last few years.

In that time, he has seen Starlink come from nowhere to revolutionise how enterprise connectivity can be managed.

“In the past, high-quality connectivity was often only available in the cities. It got patchy as you went further out.”

“In the last few years Starlink has just turned that on its head.”

“Starlink offers customers the ability to have large data plans for low cost, and the ability to use the connection anywhere. This means areas with limited, or no connectivity can be connected to the world in a way that wasn't possible before.”

“Being a wireless satellite solution though does introduce some challenges. Starlink does suffer with packet loss and occasional outages due to both obstructions and weather. Packet loss massively affects things like TCP sessions (Transmission Control Protocol). So if you're doing file copies, file uploads - anything that requires a response - performance suffers.”

“With Peplink we can actually use forward error correction and WAN smoothing (packet duplication) to improve performance and speed to get the best performance out of Starlink.”

“For UDP Real-time streams (User Datagram Protocol), packet loss and disconnections means phone calls, live video streams or face to face meetings can be interrupted. Peplink’s SpeedFusion bonding helps to deal with that by failing over to alternate connections until the Starlink recovers with little to no disruption for the users.”

“Peplink’s bonding functionality means that we can have multiple Starlinks connected. We can add in the customer's own ADSL, VDSL and fibre connection - and then we can add cellular to that as well.”

Peplink has focused on developing a tight integration with Starlink, allowing their routers to directly interface with the Starlink dish. Their new B One 5G, for example, provides advanced integration features like remote monitoring of the dish status, detecting obstructions, and automatically failing over to cellular connectivity without any disruption when needed. This is particularly useful for mobile and maritime use, says James.

“I love the fact the Peplink B One has a 5G antenna.”

“We can bond Starlink and 5G and use it for failover. If the Starlink drops for a short period, the Peplink just covers it up by using cellular.”

”It works really well - it's gone from the point where Satellite was a premium product only some people could afford to one smaller business can use. It’s opening up the cloud for smaller businesses; we're seeing farm equipment, mobile vehicles, even remote-control vehicles coming into use where it wasn’t possible before.”

“You can walk up to a customer's site and say we’re going to give you a Starlink connection. You can plug your old connection in it as well. We're going to give you one single public IP address wherever it is in the world. And that IP address will just pop up on your device and it will just work. And that's the big one.”

“It’s so simple from the customers’ side.”

“Customers are coming back saying - it just worked. That is what we can do now, with Peplink and Starlink. It makes customers happy - they plug it in, things work, and they don't notice when there's a problem.”

“That's the really exciting part, not just the new technology, but how we're using it to make it work for our customers.”