So I got tired of my internet going down so I ordered starlink.

Unfortunately starlink isn't quite there yet in terms of latency and consistency. Ping fluctuates between 80 and 160, which is super annoying. A constant 170 ping would be better. Also every 10 minutes or so it goes down for .1-.2 seconds, presumably while its switching satellites. Not long enough to DC, but can definitely tell when it happens.

My regular internet is fine on the latency front, however its down for at least a two hour chunk of time every day, as well as brief periods where its down for 5 minutes or so.

What I want to do is essentially combine them into one.
I want to be gaming on the regular internet, then as soon as it goes down automatically switch to starlink without DC'ing from the game.

I did some googling before posting this, and it seems that the solution is buying a router that supports load balancing and failover.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Most of the information I saw online was people using 2x ISP's to try to get 2x download speeds or forward certain things to each ISP, such as games running on one and youtube running on the other.
What I need is 100% of traffic on one ISP, then when it inevitably goes down, to instantly switch to the other ISP (starlink) without disconnecting. I play WoW and D2R and if I DC then its a moot point, might as well save my money.

The best video I found was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYLvcr1f6Do
Product is the Edge Router X.
Will this work for my needs or should I save my money?

The only way to have ZERO drops would be bridging the connections, which would mean 100% uptime but the Starlink latency would cause it to still bounce.

Basically what you'd want to do is set your regular internet on priority, then if that fails a health check for like 10 seconds then fail over to the Starlink. But doing this WILL cause downtime as IPs will change and your router will need to re-establish connections.

The Edge Router X can support two WAN and fail over, but if you don't have experience doing those set ups that router is FAR from plug-and-play. Looking at peoples comments about load balancing with this router are mixed, seems like it's not well supported, but does work with some playing around. You'd probably want something near commercial for that, and it would cost you.

This post was edited by Candyzcanes on Oct 27 2022 04:33pm

Thanks for the reply,
Man this rabbit-hole goes deep.
Yup, been doing some more research and came to that same conclusion.
Failover isn't what I'm looking for. Nice to have but again I'm looking for something instant. If I DC then its faster for me to just reload the game as I'm simultaneously connected to my main internet via ethernet and starlink via wifi.

It turns out that what I want is called channel bonding. Essentially my computer sends a packet of data via both isp's simultaneously, then whichever gets there faster is the one that gets used. If one ISP goes down altogether then it just uses the other one with no noticeable difference in game.

The good news is it turns there is a cheapish, extremely easy solution that does exactly what I want. Speedify. Its basically a VPN that allows you to merge multiple connections simultaneously.
It solves my problem. I can disconnect either of my two ISP and still remain in game.
The bad news is that it makes the game unplayable. Horrible horrible rubber banding.
I'm still doing some testing with WoW and random other games, Quake Champions and League of Legends, but d2r is 100% unplayable. Even if I set it to only use one of my connections and ignore the other one, I guess the VPN aspect of it and the additional step for the traffic makes the latency much worse.

The only other solution I've seen that seems to suit my needs is using OpenMPTCProuter.
There's a good write up of it here if anyone is curious. https://di-marco.net/blog/it/2022-01-29-multi_wan_and_internet_bonding_with_openmptcprouter/

If I understand it correctly though, I have to rent a VPS (virtual private server) somewhere, and all of my traffic will be communicating between that VPS and my router that I set up.
How will this be any different from the speedify solution? Seems like all of my traffic will still be doing an extra hop which will increase the latency as well.

Another option is buying a peplink router and subscribing to their SpeedFusion service, but again, I don't really see how this would be better than the speedify solution. Maybe their servers would be better, but seems like a gamble that isn't worth the investment.

It feels like I'm missing something here, there's gotta be a hardware option that does what I need it to do without having to route my traffic an extra step between the game servers and my router.

i use the peplink router for work, and yes it is a bonded connection and yes it would illustrate the issues you mentioned. you will always get rubber banding with a bond, especially with connections with that massive of a difference in ping. when you use a bonded connection, you lose anywhere from 5-10% of your packets JUST in transmission to/from the bond.
unfortunately there isn't any seamless solution for gaming. you either deal with rubber banding with the bond/load balance, or you fail over and lose your connection for the 10-15 seconds while it connects to your backup

Hmm. I did notice some packet loss, especially the more I bandwidth I was using. That seems counter intuitive though, in theory it should reduce average latency.
I reinstalled windows and am currently re-downloading d2r, will give it a shot again.
I was playing wow for a few hours earlier and it seems fine. Definitely playable.

Anyways, thanks for the heads up with peplink. I'll definitely pursue the OpenMPTCProuter route now instead. No pun intended.