Starlink + UniFi - Does it work??

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name is Chris and the most requested comment on my previous Starlink video was testing Starlink with Unify, so that's what we're going to do today. Fair warning: I haven't tried this yet, so far I've only been using Starlink. with the included wi-fi and router that comes with the package, however I have heard that you can simply disconnect from their equipment and connect it to your own equipment and it should

work

fine, so that is where we will do the test right behind me . You can see I've set up a small Unifi net

work

, so let's go ahead and start by explaining what I've set up and then we'll connect to the Starlink satellite dish.

Well, here we have a very simple Unifi network. configuration, we have our usg firewall. I think I'm going to start by connecting

starlink

to the secondary wan port and see if I can get it to work as a failover first before putting it on the primary wan port from the usg lan. we have our 860 watt unifying switch and this powers a mesh access point and now why the mesh access point? Well, because it's just the first one that I took that I had lying around, you can basically use any access point, of course, and then We're also going out to this gen 2 cloud key and the reason why I'm using a cloud key gen 2 is because I didn't want to rely on a cloud-hosted

unifi

controller because the Starlink satellite service could be a little intermittent.

That's why I want the Unifi controller to be on site, but I'm using this gen 2 cloud key. If you're setting up something similar, you can use your own locally installed cloud key or even a gen 1 cloud key that you don't have. to be this specific device, all of this equipment has been updated to the latest stable version of software as of February 15, 2021. I have the Starlink satellite dish in my backyard and I have the cable to my garage, which I have a cross. connect above, but the cross connect goes through a mocha connection and I want to test without mocha the same way I want to test just ethernet, so what we're going to do here is go ahead and run this cable. my window and then to my garage where we're going to plug it into the Starlink power brick, okay let's throw it in there, okay let's see if I can do this first try.

Today is actually a nice sunny day, which should be Great for testing, but I haven't had any problems with this in the pouring rain. I did speed tests where rain was falling on this satellite dish and clouds were covering the nine. I didn't notice any kind of slowdown. speed because of that, this is actually the first day that I'm going to test this where we have sun, so it will be interesting to see if the speeds actually increase because of the clear skies, so the black wire comes out of that. satellite dish and it ends up here on this little power brick and then the white wire comes out and powers the Starlink Wi-Fi router device here just for anyone who's curious, here's the power that's being drawn right now with the Wi-Fi router.

Fi. plugged in we can see that I have about 87 watts right now, but I've seen this fluctuate from about 85 watts to about 150 watts there, we can see that it jumped to 97 right when I was talking, okay? so now let's unplug the Starlink router, the power didn't drop too much when unplugging the Starlink router and now we're going to plug in our cable from my office, there we go back to my office and I have the other one. end of the cable that is connected to the Starlink power brick, by the way, it is a 100 foot cat 5e cable that we are connecting here and we are going to connect it to my user's voip port just to see first if I can use this as a secondary WAN.

The Starlink satellite dish is connected to the secondary WAN port of my usg. Here I am in Unify, let's see how I configure this as secondary when a failover is done, so you need to go into the settings first and then we. Now I'm going to click on networking when I first logged in. I only had a LAN and a WAN, so I said create a new network and we made a WAN type network that was available, so let me go back and edit the one I created. and then I called it wan2 the purpose is when and the network group was when 2. now originally there was no port assigned for the ipv4 connection type I left it using dhcp and then we'll leave everything else default so we saved that and Now, if we go back to our devices, we click on the usg, we want to click here on the ports and basically, previously, this port that says when to land was disabled, so you press configure interfaces and instead of disabling it now that we've created our when to connect to the network, we selected wan2 and then we applied that change once the usg was provisioned, exited and got an IP address from the Starlink satellite dish, so now if we click on the usg details here, we can see the IP address. from my lan which is 192.168.42.1, then we have wan one which has an aggregated IP address of xfinity and then we have wan2 which also has an aggregated IP address of Starlink.

Now this is a question that many people had. Starlink uses what is called. cgnat or carrier grade nat is a way to basically stay within the ipv4 address space, but you can actually save a lot of ipv4 ipv addresses, so now it's clear that the downside of having

starlink

running over cgnet are a couple of things , number one,

does

not exist. way to do any kind of port forwarding, at least not yet. I mean, maybe that's something they'll allow in the future or maybe once ipv6 is available you'll be able to do some sort of port forwarding, but you won't be able to do that. forwarding with Starlink, as far as I know, the other thing today is that a lot of people were asking, what about voice over IP?

VoIP has a lot of problems with nat, so I would be very surprised if VoIP works well. via this connection, but I'll give it a try, though, that'll be something for a different video on a different day. Well, let's look at the failover itself if we go back to configuration and networking and edit when two, you can see the load balancing here. i set it to failover only so you can choose failover only or weighted load balancing and then you can set the load balancing weight for example if i wanted it to be 50 50 between my xfinity connection and starlink connection in our case even though we are just using it as a failover I want it to be 100 xfinity unless xfinity stops working and then I want starlink to take over ok now let's test ok here we have a persistent ping I'll restart it, we have a persistent ping running. 1.1.1.1 if we look at what myip.com is, let me update this, you can see my public ipv4 address starts with 96, okay, so that's my xfinity wan IP address.

Now we're going to disconnect xfinity, so xfinity has been I went back to our persistent ping and there was no interruption, so we didn't see any interruption in the persistent ping, but if I go back to what is my ip ctrl f5, now you can see that my public ipv4 address is a 143 address, okay? so look it's 143, although that's how we know this is using cgnet because my public IP, the way it shows up on the internet, is 143 dot something, something, but if we come here and look at the usg we can see that. wan 2's IP address is actually 100.68.134.85, so it's not 143.

So nothing happens with that connection. Let's do some speed tests so fast.com shows us 97 megabits per second. Let's do uh speedtest.net, we could see. spacex starlink we're going to say "go ahead" and by the way, I know that the desktop version of speedtest.net removes some of the browser overhead so you can get slightly better speeds, but for now we're going to stick with this. High Ping 153 millisecond ping I typically see somewhere between 20 and 30 ping and 83.46 megabits download times 28.59 upload. I'm going to run it one more time, hopefully we can get a little bit more, a little bit better ping this time, so 120.79. down and 14.06 up with a ping of 26 milliseconds, so again, this is a satellite service, so it's not going to be as robust and reliable as you would expect from something like xfinity cable or t-fiber or something, but that's really good and I will tell you what many people said in the comments: Starlink is super expensive.

It is very expensive. $99 a month for Starlink for these types of speeds. It's ridiculous, how expensive, but I don't really see it that way. If you're just looking to get a fast and affordable internet connection, then you probably have that option in your area. Go with xfinity. Go with comcast. Go with any provider in whatever country you are in because they will probably have a solid and reliable cable. Fiber internet services at reasonable prices, you know, $69, $59, something like that. Totally fine, that's not what Starlink is for. To me, Starlink is giving this kind of speed for 99 dollars a month to people in super rural areas who don't have any internet or maybe their only option is like 3 megabits dsl, which will also cost them more like 60 to 70 dollars a month. month, so if my only option in life was three megabits dsl for $69 a month and I could pay $99 a month and I get Starlink satellite internet with a 120 megabit download.

I'm going to analyze all of that and now I'm the target audience for that. Here's another target audience for Starlink backup connections for businesses, so I'm a business. I have xfinity. business class cable here in my home office when my cable connection goes down it's disastrous for me my whole life is on the internet so it's absolutely incredible for me as a company to pay 99 dollars a month or you can consider it as 1200. dollars a year to have an internet connection as a backup completely separate from the fiber or terrestrial cable that the local cable company provides, okay, that is invaluable to me as a business owner because I know when Xfinity goes down or even has a problem. if they're only offline for three or four hours, that means lost business and lost productivity.

Now I have a way to stay online all the time, especially if you are in some of the areas affected by power outages and hurricanes or similar. Right now you know Texas is under a foot of snow and they just weren't prepared for it. You have options like Starlink for a hundred dollars a month, so suddenly a hundred dollars a month

does

n't sound so bad when you live life on the Internet as a business like I do, so looking at the variations in the ping we receive, let me stop this ping that I have and now look at what we see here, it looks like we're between about 20 milliseconds. and 40 milliseconds, but if I scroll back you should see some variation, so for example here we got to a point where my ping jumped up to about 117 to 136 in that range, you also see something higher, like 70 and 90 here , you already know. and although it's big it's usually in the 20's or 30's as far as latency goes now the reason the latency changes could be due to this so this is the live Starlink satellite map now that I'm in Oregon .

I'm like in this area here and now we can see that I'm covered by one, two, three different satellites, but these are constantly changing, so as the satellites move, you'll notice that there are some areas like look here. I don't know where I screwed that up. I just went around the world, so you'll notice there are some areas that just aren't covered properly, so look down here, like in the Texas area, that's why I started beta testing the Starlink satellite at higher latitudes. because look at the satellite coverage here in Canada and the northern United States versus the satellite coverage down here, so, for example, this whole section of Texas here currently doesn't have any. satellites aloft, I anticipate response time and latency will improve as Starlink launches more satellites and in fact they launched a few more satellites yesterday.

I think they released 60 of them and if I'm not mistaken, these are them. I believe these were launched and are now making their way into the satellite orbit or into the satellite network as they were launched. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that way to me. There are a lot of satellites that were launched yesterday. One thing I'm not sure about with this map and maybe you guys can let me know in the comments below, but what is the difference between yellow ring satellites and green ring satellites? I'm not sure, but look now, so if we move back closer to Oregon, this entire section here maybe isn't necessarily covered as well as it could be, there should be a lot of overlap like we're seeing above.

Over here and right here there's kind of a gap and down here there's kind of a gap, so they're going to fill up. I'm not sure exactly how many satellites there are today, but it's supposed to end up being around 40,000 satellites covering the planet with Starlink Internet service and if you want to see for yourself or check the satellite coverage in your own area, the URL This is what the satellite map point space is for. I will also place alink in The description is fine, so one more test I want to do here. You know I would like to run this as the backup internet and then change it as the primary internet for this use, but now I'm doing this.

I don't really see the need to do that, I basically just pulled xfinity and I'm running out of wan2, so there's not much point in changing the Starlink connection to wan1 when essentially that's what I'm doing. I'm already doing it, but what does what I want to do is show you the connection through the uap acm as my wireless access point, so there is my uap acm on my phone. Here I'm going to select my

unifi

network, which is the space that you can see here. with a little rocket emoji for those of you who don't know you can use emojis on your wireless ssids so we are connected to space let's see what kind of IP address I got 192.168.42.105. so I know I'm on this network because it's 192.168.42.x and now let's go ahead and run our speed test again, we can see spacex starlink, we're going to say: 31 millisecond ping and there we go, we're done. up with 82.8 down and 15.6 up going from my cell phone to the uap acm to the usg to my 100 foot cable to the starlink power brick to the starlink satellite dish to the starlink satellites and then back to the terrestrial reception stations, like this which, man, I mean again, just amazing.

I'm totally blown away by this whole setup and I should also mention that the setup I have here is unified, but it's basically going to be the same no matter what type of you know the home network connectivity you're using, if you're using, just like you know a Netgear router you bought at best this will still work if you are using udm pro, it will work if you are using edge routers, if you are using pf sense with ruckus wireless access points it will work. The bottom line is that you can take the connection directly from the Starlink power brick, plug it into your own equipment and you will get an IP address, which means they don't have to use your equipment, okay, so here we go, hope I answered many of your questions about how to set up Starlink as backup Internet or even primary Internet with your own equipment without using Starlink's included Wi-Fi router if you have any additional questions, please write them in the comments below.

I'll be happy to review it and maybe answer it in a future video in the meantime, if you enjoyed this video, be sure to give me a thumbs up and if you'd like. I like to see more videos like this. Make sure you click Subscribe. My name is Chris with crosstalk solutions and thank you so much for watching.