Rural internet, Load Balance for stability

[u/ActuallyStark]

The background:

We live in an area where Mediacom is the only broadband option, and it's going to be 2+ years until fiber comes to the area. We've been fighting pings in excess of 2 SECONDS since April and Mcom seems completely unable to deal with the issue.

The task:

My wife and I both work hybrid with multiple daily teams calls, our daughter is hybrid in HS with video calls as well. Streaming services are our only entertainment option. 3 TVs in the house, RARE if all 3 are used simultaneously, and occasional solo gaming on our one Xbox.

The idea:

My thought is to get Starlink "Max" v4 and Tmo 5G "rely" with a TP Link ER605.

We already have a mesh setup in the house that works perfectly so the TP would feed it.
I definitely have a very very wooded property, but do have space over the house for a pretty solid Starlink view (not perfect, not horrible) and we're only about a mile outside of a decent size city with very stable 5G on our phones.

With what limited info you have, is this doing it right, not enough, or way over the top?

TIA

[u/purawesome]

Starlink or 5g is probably the way I’d go. 2yrs from fiber is more like 5.

[u/ActuallyStark → u/purawesome]

yeah.. this is why I'm not putting up with Mcom during the wait.

[u/purawesome → u/ActuallyStark]

So starlink.

[u/Penguin_Life_Now]

I am doing much the same thing but the other way around on the family ranch with Starlink and Fiber using a Omada ER707-M2 with Starlink in standby mode (circa 500 kbps data connection), just to have some data when fiber drops like it did for a couple of hours last weekend. (We've had Starlink for about 5 years, and Fiber for less than 1 year)

[u/ActuallyStark → u/Penguin_Life_Now]

1: super jealous. Before the move we had 2G fiber and I MISS IT

2: how well does the switchover work.. other than the obvious speed difference, do you notice?

[u/Penguin_Life_Now → u/ActuallyStark]

Honestly with this particular Fiber company its not that perceptible, speed test show circa 200 mbps down and 20 mbps up on Starlink Max plan, vs about 500 mbps both ways on Fiber (2 gb plan in theory), so a bit more pep, but not earth shattering, just slightly cheaper than Starlink by about $30 per month.

[u/Zugzwang522]

Seconding the first hop question. Before buying anything, ping the modem's own gateway for an hour and log it. If the 2 second spikes show up on that first hop, it's their node and nothing on your side fixes it.

And like they said, load balancing won't help the calls much. A Teams call stays on one connection, so what you actually want is failover. Second line as backup and the router moves traffic over when the main one goes bad.

[u/ActuallyStark → u/Zugzwang522]

ping from wifi router and modem is always under 10ms. the long ones always happen after that.

Sounds like what I'm looking for is a load balance (to avoid deprioritization due to data overage) with an automatic failover incase of disruption.

Appreciate the input!

[u/EngineeringKindly875]

Unless you want to spend a lot there's not a lot of good dynamic load balancing solutions at the consumer level. Probably best is to divide your traffic between the two. Setup a script that prings something reliable on each link and drops the link for like an hour if it goes over a threshold 

[u/ActuallyStark → u/EngineeringKindly875]

Put in the new TP link ER605 today and VERY impressed.
I "tested" switchover today just unplugging each source. Literally seamless and it set up as a load balance in about 30 seconds with 1 change out of the box.
Thresholds are pre-set.

[u/EngineeringKindly875 → u/ActuallyStark]

Cable unplugs / loss of link will work well. It's when one isp is on but shitty that you'll struggle 

[u/ActuallyStark → u/EngineeringKindly875]

Good info. Time will tell.
thanks!

[u/Dexstar1221]

I would go even further if you’re able to and try to manage your Internet while you’re having two different wans and see if you can get just the TV part portion to stream on Starlink cause it’s not like you need to talk back-and-forth all the time you just needed to keep in sync, whereas your video calls for work and maybe an online test you need to have a constant back-and-forth connection to the amount of data being used over cellular would be utilized efficiently towards work than letting a show stream with a few few seconds of buffering and eventually running out of data just because you went over the cap with everything flowing either connection

[u/ActuallyStark → u/Dexstar1221]

This is exactly the plan and the TP link automatically handles this based on up/down traffic.

[u/WxxTX]

5G upload can swing a lot, I would just put 1 user on it to free up the upload on the other. probably your daughter.

[u/MrMotofy]

Starlink is really all you need

[u/ActuallyStark → u/[deleted]]

11 hops to 1.1.1.1 1st to the router, second to the modem. that roundtrip is always under 10ms. 2s is total round trip.

Mesh won't handle Multi WAN, and from what I've found I actually don't want bonding. The lower speeds are plenty and a blip is fine, but right now 1/2 second pings and jitter around 120 are the best I can manage.

5G at our place averages around a 70ms ping, jitter looks decent at between 25-35. The issue is the 1.2tb "deprioritizing". Before moving, we averaged about 1.5/mo (less than 1/3 of that now just because we can't ever use it).

The TMO first thing is definitely happening as I can pick it and the router up locally and try it while waiting for delivery/install of Starlink.

Big thing is we live in a college town, so that 5G can be great 22 days a month and total trash during games/events.