SD-WAN and LEO Sat – Bigleaf Networks

[Video] Starlink comparison against fiber, cable, LTE, and GEO Sat, plus static IP via SD-WAN

Bigleaf Networks — Thu, 19 May 2022 22:31:43 +0000

Recently Bigleaf founder Joel Mulkey got hold of the latest high-speed, low-latency, low-earth orbit (LEO) technology, Starlink. He conducted a hands-on comparison of how the technology performs against fiber, cable, LTE, GEO Sat & static IP via SD-WAN. See how they did.

Today I’m going to talk about low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite, like Starlink, and how you can use that for business connectivity needs. I’m here at my home office and notably, I don’t have any landline connectivity. I have a fixed wireless circuit from a local regional wireless ISP or WISP, a cellular option, LTE connection, as well as a geosynchronous satellite option. And so, we’ll add to those a LEO Sat through Starlink and take a look at what it does.

Setting Up Starlink

To install Starlink, you first use their app to scan the sky to see if the location that you’re planning has a clear view of where their satellites will be flying by.

*Welcome to my networking rack here in the house. In here, I’ve got a switch and my Bigleaf router, my SD-WAN router, and there’s three WAN circuits connected. We’re going to hook up the fourth today!*

We can see here, I’m logged into the Bigleaf Web Dashboard. I pulled up my house. And on the overview page, I can see I have three WAN circuits configured so far. What I’ll do is I’ll go into our configuration tab here, go into edit mode, and I’ll add a new WAN circuit. You can specify geostationary or low earth orbit for your satellite type and the platform will adapt accordingly. And just a moment ago, the tunnels came up.

Comparing The Data

We now have some graph data.

I want to address a few questions I think might be running through folks’ minds. First, how do I think about Starlink versus most landline type circuits, fiber cable, DSL, that kind of thing?

I think the health alarm data we can see is really useful to know how these comparisons sit. If I was to go pull up another customer site, which I’ll do here.

So this location, we have some Comcast fiber. This is in Oregon. This is a typical fiber health graph. Literally nothing. This circuit above here, this is a cable circuit, looks pretty clean as well. Users are not going to notice too much of what’s going on here. You’ve got a little bit of jitter upload and download at times. I would say this is pretty squeaky clean for a cable circuit. You can see them totally clean sometimes, but this is a nice cable circuit. We see them with plenty of packet loss and other issues at times. We’ll take a look at another location here. This top circuit here is again, Comcast fiber. So we can see, it looks pretty clean. There’s a couple blips. So, this one could be user impacting. This is middle of the day. You have basically a mini outage.

Then Frontier Fios. We’ll take a look at that one. Again, looks pretty clean, a couple blips there, not too big of a deal.

So back to my house: If you compare those graphs against the Starlink graph for the same time period, it’s got periods in the middle of the night where it looks pretty clean, but during the day, there’s definitely a lot of variability. And that’s what I would probably highlight.

With most wireless type connections, they’re going to be more variable than a landline circuit. Yet, they are also a great redundancy path. Throughput wise, that can vary as well. So, fiber’s typically going to offer you more throughput than what we’re seeing with Starlink, which is around somewhere between 60 and 120mg down and upload is very variable up from zero to 15 megabit up at my location here.

Let’s take a look at other health paths like ViaSat. ViaSat is a geosynchronous satellite, and we can see that quality wise, it’s actually very good! Now this graph doesn’t reflect the absolute latency of the path to traverse to geosynchronous orbit and back. The latency that our platform measures is in the form of relative one-way latency. So, our technology does some things to adapt for that, knowing that geosynchronous satellite does have that higher latency, just kind of in the background.

You might wonder, well, what’s difference between geosynchronous satellite and low earth orbit satellite? I drew a cute little diagram here to show that. (4:22)

So, if you’ve got my house, the red depicts essentially what is happening with the lower earth orbit, where there’s a shorter path from my house to the satellite, to the ground station, which then is connected via fiber to whatever data I’m reaching, some data center, whereas the geosynchronous satellite is a much larger distance. So, the reason the latency is much lower is because it’s taking a much shorter path, just geographically.

The time of flight of the RF signals is reduced.

Compare Against LTE Circuit

Now, if we compare against the LTE circuit I have, the LTE circuit is much more consistent in its behavior and much lower in packet loss, but the throughputs a lot less. And when I’ve tested here, I’m getting about 4mhgs each way on that circuit max.

And then lastly, the fixed wireless circuit I have from a local residential fixed wireless provider. We can see that during times of load, there is significant jitter and packet loss. I’d say it sits in between the LTE and the Starlink as far as variability.

So, all in all, each wireless circuit does have its pros and cons. And you need to look at what’s available in your area and trade-offs of throughput and performance characteristics.

Static IP Address

Now, what about a static IP address? That’s something that a lot of businesses need to be able to deploy with certain use cases, VPNs, or hosting a server, that kind of thing. And none of the circuits that I have, have a standard static IP address.

They’re all using a DHCP provided NAT IP address. And the nice thing is with Bigleaf Networks, I actually have a static IP block. Bigleaf creates a tunnel across each of these circuits and delivers a single public static IP address over them. Just like you would get if you had BGP in a carrier-grade enterprise environment.

The nice thing is with Bigleaf Networks, I actually have a static IP block. Bigleaf creates a tunnel across each of these circuits and delivers a single public static IP address over them.
Joel Mulkey

So… What About SD-WAN?

Lastly, do you need SD-WAN to make use of lower earth orbit like Starlink?

Well, looking at the health of the circuits at my home here, I would say YES. If I had just this one circuit, or even if I had multiple circuits with a less sophisticated load balancing QS mechanism, I wouldn’t be able to do things like voice calling or Zoom — those sorts of sensitive applications — in a reliable manner.

And we could see examples of that here. I had some Zoom calls this morning, all this green saying VoIP was the Zoom traffic. And we could see that the SD-WAN platform really had to adapt hard to make best use of that. So, here’s my LTE circuit that used that for upload traffic.

This was around 10:30 to 10:50 AM and we could see that the alarms were fairly low at that time — level two jitter was all that it was seeing. The down link looks like, in part, on the fixed wireless circuit around 10:40 to 10:50 timeframe. (6:50)

It’s kind of jumpy because it was I think moving the traffic around and it’s likely because alarms varied. So, there’s some traffic that ended up on the fixed wireless, and then other traffic ended up here on the Starlink circuit at that time. So the platform was adapting to make sure that each packet was writing over the best possible circuit.

If I didn’t have that in place, my Zoom quality would not have been as good. Now, would it have been unusable? In this case, no. Starlink alarms aren’t terrible at that time.

If they were level four or five, yeah. At that point, that’s when people are unclicking their video. They’re going to just audio or saying, “Hey, can I call you on the phone?”

More On Starlink x SD-WAN

Another SD-WAN feature of note that Starlink really will need to be successful in the business environment is something that can provide QoS over very variable bandwidth circuits.

Via Iperf testing through the platform, we can see this is download testing. This is just raw Iperf traffic varying between 50 megabits a second up to 100. (8:44)

In the upload direction, we see traffic varies even more considerably, 9mgs down to 1mg.

Important: If you just have a static QoS policy applied to the circuit saying it’s 10mgs or something, that QoS isn’t going to work. The traffic’s going to hit constrictions within the Starlink service, get buffered and either dropped or delayed. So, you need a platform like Bigleaf that can detect that variability and bandwidth, adapt to that, and ensure QoS prioritization through that path, even as conditions change!

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think Starlink and low earth orbit are fantastic technologies. I’m really excited about what they bring to bear for folks in rural areas like me and businesses that can’t get good landline connectivity or need a really solid redundant path that offers more throughput than LTE can!

For business-critical use cases, I would combine it though with SD-WAN and another circuit, if you have, and we’d be more than happy to help you out with that at Bigleaf Networks.

Thanks for that walkthrough, Joel. We really appreciate it!

You can learn more about making the Starlink Satellite part of the connectivity plans at your business & see how Bigleaf can improve your connectivity for all your connection types by requesting a FREE demo. If you have any questions, send us an email at sales@bigleaf.net.

Starlink and SD-WAN deep dive: Install, troubleshooting, landline and wireless comparison

Bigleaf Networks — Sun, 15 May 2022 03:31:00 +0000

Get a deep-dive on the Starlink LEO Satellite service as our Founder and CEO installs it at his house (both via WiFi bridge and hard-wired), gets a static IP address via Starlink, troubleshoots performance issues, and compares it against Fiber, Cable, Fixed-wireless, 4G LTE, and GEO satellite circuits. Want a shorter version of this video without the integration and troubleshooting details? Check out the 10-min version here: https://youtu.be/ZdT52RCkZo8 CHAPTERS 0:00 – Intro 1:56 – Starlink Unboxing 3:17 – Initial Install Location 4:15 – iOS App Stats and Speed Tests 5:12 – Physical Network Integration 5:41 – WiFi Bridge Integration Diagram 6:48 – Configuring Starlink in Bigleaf SD-WAN 9:44 – Troubleshooting Packet Loss 12:43 – Moving from WiFi to Wired Ethernet 14:10 – Moving the dish to the roof 15:14 – Comparing Starlink vs. Fiber and Cable 18:18 – Comparing Starlink vs. GEO Sat (ViaSat) 20:10 – Comparing Starlink vs. LTE 20:32 – Comparing Starlink vs. Fixed Wireless 21:04 – How to get a Static IP address on Starlink 21:50 – Does Starlink need SD-WAN for business use? 24:20 – Varying throughput on Starlink with iPerf tests 25:19 – Conclusion

How can Starlink satellite service be a part of my connectivity plans?

Amy Chan — Tue, 10 May 2022 17:02:41 +0000

There is a new option to consider for business-class satellite internet connectivity: low earth orbit (LEO) technology. Starlink is currently the most broadly available global solution for this high-speed, low-latency broadband. It’s innovative LEO technology is a game changer for businesses who rely on satellite service for high-speed internet. For organizations who struggle with latency using old school geostationary (GEO) satellite connectivity, Starlink provides a viable alternative.

Beyond the limits of physical connections

The pathways from most homes and businesses to the internet are through cables. Those cables may be coaxial, copper, or fiber, but they are physical lines connecting that building to the Internet. Despite all the innovation and advances over the past decade, an astounding number of rural businesses struggle with reliable and performant network access. Sixty-six percent of rural small businesses say poor internet or cell phone connectivity negatively impacts their business. This issue now receives more attention as more people shift to remote work, wherever they reside.

“Old school” geostationary satellite connectivity

For over 20 years, GEO satellite technology has been available in North America. It provides broadband connectivity to most places that can see the sky. Generally sold under the brands Exede, ViaSat, and HughesNet, it continues to be a lifeline for people in rural areas who have no other provider options. However, the service can be expensive, and performance is inferior to landline options available in more densely populated areas. This can mean slower downloads and VPNs, poor video conferencing quality, and spotty streaming service.

For providers, it takes a lot of investment and work to make even this level of service available: The satellite dishes for Exede customers in the Americas likely point up at Viasat-2, a 14,000 pound satellite that launched in 2017 after taking 40 months to build. That one device cost $600 million.

The drawbacks of GEO Satellite

Connection anywhere you can see the sky is great, but GEO satellite service clients do have to contend with some limitations. In particular, latency. The Viasat satellites are in orbit 22,000 miles away. That means every bit of traffic has to travel a total of 44,000 miles up and back. The result is latency of around 600 ms – over half a second.

Viasat has improved on this through creative TCP optimizations in their platform, but those optimizations don’t help tunneled traffic like VPNs and SD-WAN, or other non-TCP traffic like most VoIP and video. Since real time calls take two-way communication, the high latency makes a Zoom participant delayed over one second in conversation. It requires a lot of patience to have a meeting when everyone must wait for those pauses.

Enter Starlink, LEO connectivity

The newcomer, and seeming game-changer, for those seeking a satellite connection is Starlink. Starlink leads the way in the LEO space. LEO is a different approach and a different type of connection.

Instead of a single giant geostationary satellite 22,000 miles away, Starlink utilizes a swarm of thousands (as of this writing 2,112) of smaller, relatively cheaper satellites. Starlink launches a new batch of satellites every week or so. They are less than 1/20th the size of ViaSat-2 (around 650 pounds) and create a constellation of satellites across the sky. The antennas at both the service location and at the ground station where the constellation is connected into the Internet switch between the satellites as they orbit past, just like a cell phone in a car zooming down the highway switches between towers as seamlessly as possible.

Key to reducing latency, the Starlink satellites are only around 200 miles up. That is 1/100th the distance to the GEO orbits. The result is low latency of around 40-60 milliseconds – a number quite similar to wired broadband in urban areas.

Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper are promising new technologies. Perhaps we can look forward to a future when connectivity is not tied to physical wires. It could create opportunities and lower the cost of internet connectivity worldwide.

Our founder Joel Mulkey often works from his rural home where terrestrial connectivity options are sub-optimal (only very slow DSL is available), so he is always on the lookout for ways to improve his connectivity. He recently unboxed and installed his Starlink “Dishy” terminal, which he will connect to his Bigleaf router and mix with connections from a fixed wireless provider, 4G LTE, and a GEO satellite service. Check out his video on the results from that installation.

If you are looking to lean on Starlink for critical connectivity, it is healthy to be suspicious of its reliability.

What are the concerns with Starlink?

LEO connectivity is complex and unproven. If you are looking to lean on Starlink for critical connectivity, it is healthy to be suspicious of its reliability. Can it perform as claimed? While Starlink is aiming to provide 1 Gbps, current customers are getting between 40 and 150 Mbps down. And when will they work out the kinks? On a weekend in April 2022, Starlink users across the globe experienced extensive outages that the company has not explained. The Starlink support page is sparse and not particularly informative.

Using the best of Starlink in any situation

For the lower latency and potential throughput increase that Starlink provides over the older GEO technologies, getting it for his rural location is hugely appealing for Joel. But as a sole source of connectivity, he can’t tolerate any unexpected outages.

“This is a place that Bigleaf really shines. I gain all the benefits of this new technology without being subjected to the drawbacks. Bigleaf will optimize my use between Starlink and my other connections in real-time, insulating me from any outages or brownouts. Plus, I get a static public IP address block that works over all of my wireless circuits.” Joel said.

Bigleaf and Starlink applied

Bigleaf allows the connection of up to 4 circuits. Along with rural locations that lack options, a LEO satellite link could be valuable for any facility seeking a redundant connection that does not use the shared routes of many physical service providers. If a backhoe takes out the cabling to the building, Starlink would be unaffected.

With Bigleaf, a “backup” connection does not sit dormant awaiting an emergency. Unlike a traditional failover-only circuit, Bigleaf’s AI utilizes all connections simultaneously and with their same-IP failover, can automatically route traffic to the best available circuit if one fails. Even existing video conferences continue without dropping.

"This is a place that Bigleaf really shines. I gain all the benefits of this new technology without being subjected to the drawbacks. Bigleaf will optimize my use between Starlink and my other connections in real-time, insulating me from any outages or brownouts."

Joel Mulkey, Bigleaf Networks, Founder and CEO Tweet

Bigleaf’s ability to automatically monitor your circuit conditions, intelligently load balance, and make routing and QoS changes in real time further adds to its ability to deliver performant connectivity. In the instance of a rural site without any ideal broadband options, users can combine a more reliable but lower bandwidth connection with a less reliable but higher bandwidth account to get the best of both.

In short, Bigleaf can monitor the health of satellite connections in real time, along with the other circuits being used, and route the identified traffic types down the respective circuits that will deliver the best application performance. This allows a user to optimize the circuit conditions of the LEO satellite path even if there is high latency or jitter.

Even if you don’t choose Starlink, you can mix a 4G or DSL network connection (typically faster and fairly reliable) with a GEO satellite connection (available almost anywhere) and real-time apps would automatically use the lower latency network while file transfers would use the larger bandwidth connection.

To further support the use of Starlink, Bigleaf has recently included a preconfigured LEO satellite setting. Site operators can connect their Starlink base station to the Bigleaf router and quickly configure it to recognize the LEO satellite circuit

Starlink won’t be the last innovative network access technology

Starlink is an exciting option that was hard to believe possible just a few years ago. Many people are holding their breath to see what 5G capabilities will come to the market. One thing is certain: Technology will continue to offer new ways to connect us. As new options grow and refine, Bigleaf allows them to be utilized to their best now.

Learn more about how we can do so for your business by requesting a free demo today.