Failover router

If it's only 10 second disconnects, you'd be better off allowing the Starlink to reconnect instead of failing over to a backup and then have to "re-fail" (what a word) to your primary several times a day.

If most of the Starlink fails happen when you are not streaming, you'll probably not notice them.

I think most (all?) routers that do failover will take some time to do it, probably 15-30 seconds. Usually they just ping a server every few seconds, then switch to the other connection after probably 3 failed pings. Some allow you to configure the timing, but there is usually a lower limit to prevent kicking back and forth all the time. That would be bad because apps would have to keep renegotiating their active connections. That's worse than recovering from a temporary hiccup.

Some routers that do failover will also do load balancing. This would split your connections across the two links, but it won't combine their speed and reliability into a single connection. Rather, the router will choose a link for each app "session". Maybe your zoom call will go over satellite, and maybe netflix will stream over lte. You get more total throughput, but not for a single app connection, and you are also exposed to twice as many potential connection failures (but on half as many client connections at a time).

Link bonding I believe would speed up a single "session" connection and mostly eliminate the downtime if a link goes down, but I don't even know if that's possible when using two ISPs. I think both ends of the bonded links need to be "aware" of the situation.

It's possible that an app and the server(s) that it connects to could use a load-balanced connection as if it were bonded, but I think it would have to be written specifically to do this in order to handle out-of-order packets that come from different "directions". Maybe Zoom actually does this. Doesn't it work pretty well on mobile when switching from wifi to cellular? Maybe the desktop app handles it pretty well, too.


This is my novice-to-reasonably-knowledgeable understanding of it all, at least.

If you’re looking for “instantaneous” failover you’re going to have to use something that does per packet qos across two links. This type of equipment is used primarily in the enterprise, and has the price to match. Typically falls under the SD-WAN category. Look into a Velocloud Edge 510. You have to purchase the appliance plus a license, or run a virtual appliance with license. You’re looking at $1000+ per year.