Update: after most of a day of using it I bought a year of Speedify. Gonna run out my free trial here first though. I’ll probably sign up for a plan ($3 to $6 a month) for at least a year, to tide me over with Starlink. I’m really impressed with Speedify so far. You might be throughput limited by USB speeds (for the extra ethernet ports) or encryption speed, but I’m not sure what the limit would be. I think the easiest way forward with what Speedify has right now is to set up a Raspberry Pi with three ethernet ports two for inputs from ISPs, one for output to a regular router. That’s what got me interested more generally in multipath technologies for Linux it’d be nice to have a router designed to do this. I wish they had a whole-network product! You can probably hack something up using their Linux support and a clever router, their product page indicates they indicate they’re sort of OK with you doing that but might charge you accordingly. Second, my upload was really limited during these tests and so the WiFi meaningfully could supplement it. First, redundancy seems more important on the uplink than the downlink. (Although I’d expected 50Mbps on the uplink, needs further testing.) I noticed on the download speed test it was only using the Starlink whereas on upload it saturated both my Starlink and my WISP. These aren’t the best I’ve seen I’ve gotten 150/20 through Speedify, which is about the limit of my Starlink throughput. Here’s a couple of DSL reports speed tests. There’s some more technical details here. Mostly they’re talking about audio and video streams but the marketing copy mentions gaming, too, so presumably that’s also covered. Streaming mode is a “smart” middle ground it monitors each stream and decides when you need more redundancy. Speed and redundant seem to be two extremes: either maximize performance (but no redundancy) or maximize reliability. The user can choose the bonding mode: speed, streaming, or redundant mode. Speedify, for their part, says you should expect 200-300Mbps.Ī final limitation is that Speedify doesn’t give a lot of control over what it’s doing. Finally some folks complain that Speedify makes their links slower than necessary. Speedify has a special “turn this off for video” feature, but of course video is exactly when you might most want to have Speedify. Also a bunch of video services like Netflix and Amazon now refuse to serve video to VPN datacenters because they’re so often used to work around country restrictions, etc. That works fine actually.Īnother drawback is that Speedify is a VPN service terminated in a data center. (Maybe there’s a way to set up a virtual ethernet device in Windows? Dunno.) I’m working around this by having plugged in a separate WiFi adapter that’s connected to one ISP, with the ethernet to the other. What I’d like to do is use a single ethernet adapter for both my ISPs and have Speedify bond two separate gateways. One drawback is that Speedify seems to require different actual network devices to bond. The UI is pretty slick too, with decent monitoring and configurability. There’s a free no-account-required option for initial testing, limited to 2GB. Installs smoothly, autodetects your links, sets it all up and you’re running on Speedify in seconds. The Windows install experience is a dream. So far I’ve lost 0.4% of pings to 8.8.8.8 over most of an hour that’s better than I see using either ISP alone. That’s neat! Also speed tests show I’m getting the full speed of my Starlink, at least sometimes, so it’s not constrained to the lowest common denominator. But the video never stopped and the ssh session stayed alive, presumably using the Wifi backup to my other ISP. The main thing I know about Speedify is I was watching a Youtube video and had an open ssh session and unplugged my ethernet cable that connects me to Starlink. The emphasis on TCP is also a limitation, I’d like a redundancy solution for all IP not just TCP. The Linux kernel has support and there’s various implementations but I can’t tell if any of them are really usable a lot look like research projects. That’s a general technology for doing something similar. I imagine it’s particularly useful to bond crappy hotel wifi with a cellular hotspot (assuming you have two wifi adapters.)īefore I go on about Speedify I want to mention Multipath TCP. I’m using this to paper over Starlink’s unreliability. It can use extra links to boost speed or reliabilty or both. It’s a VPN service whose client on your desktop / laptop computer is smart enough to bond two Internet links. Trying to make my Starlink setup reliable enough to use regularly, I think I hit on a good consumer solution: Speedify.
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