Hi,

I'm have an office in a remote area (with no prospect of fixed line connectivity!) with a Vigor 2927 LTE using a 3 mobile SIM in one slot, and a Vodafone SIM as failover in the second. I can VPN into the office network from home using Draytek SmartVPN (with a DDNS service). So far, so good. Yesterday i received a Starlink kit (at home), set it up, bam! 250mbps in the middle of nowhere. Big change from our usual 10-15mbps.

Now I have only a pretty basic understanding of networking, just enough to get my Draytek configured and working. My question is: if I install my Starlink at the office and hook it up to the Draytek, will I scupper my VPN access (because - presumably - Starlink won't give me a static IP address the way 3 mobile does)? Is it possible to configure the Draytek router to use both Starlink and mobile broadband, such that I would still be able to VPN in? Speed is not particularly important on the VPN side, I only need basic access.

Apologies if this is a very newbie question - the Draytek is the first real router I've used and I feel I'm barely scratching the surface of all its features. But OMG what a pleasure it is to finally have a router where one can get at all the settings, as opposed to the ever-more-crappy consumer routers you get from Vodafone etc.

folderol wrote:
My question is: if I install my Starlink at the office and hook it up to the Draytek, will I scupper my VPN access (because - presumably - Starlink won't give me a static IP address the way 3 mobile does)?
Is it possible to configure the Draytek router to use both Starlink and mobile broadband, such that I would still be able to VPN in?

Starlink and inbound services of any kind - not just VPN - won't work, while ever it doesn't have a 'real-world' (routable) IP address. (It doesn't have to be fixed, though that is helpful - but it can't be an IP address that's 'private' (belongs to the ISP).

As per this thread: https://forum.draytek.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=24345 the IP address assigned belongs to a very unusual 'public' IP address range - but yet is not reachable. Some sort of experimental setup, I'm not familiar with!

What is the actual configuration you want to end up (I'm confused: if you move the Starlink to the office, what will you use at home? ... ditto the 2927, where's that going? - and what's the current Office router?)

Hi,

Thanks for your answer. In terms of what I'd _like_ to end up with: a Starlink at the office (where the Vigor 2927 is) as the 'primary' connection, ideally retaining at least one LTE SIM connection as a fallback should Starlink go down. This seems pretty straightforward and doable. Now if I could _also_ have the LTE connection live simultaneously such that it could continue to provide me with a real-world reachable IP address that I can use to VPN in to the office network, that would be fantastic. From my reading last night it seems like it is possible to have multiple connections from the router to the internet (and even have load balancing between them).

Is it feasible to have the LTE connection continue in place as my VPN endpoint? And can I configure the router to provide DDNS updates using the IP address provided by the LTE connection? If I know it's doable, I can probably work out how to do it from the support docs and trial and error

The 'home' end isn't as important. I can continue to use my existing 4G connection, I just set the Starlink up here initially to see how well it worked and whether it was reliable enough to use at the office.

folderol wrote:
Now if I could _also_ have the LTE connection live simultaneously such that it could continue to provide me with a real-world reachable IP address that I can use to VPN in to the office network, that would be fantastic. From my reading last night it seems like it is possible to have multiple connections from the router to the internet (and even have load balancing between them).

I agree - that sounds perfectly plausible.

He also wrote:
Is it feasible to have the LTE connection continue in place as my VPN endpoint? And can I configure the router to provide DDNS updates using the IP address provided by the LTE connection?

I believe so (with the caveat that I have neither Starlink, Vigor 2927, nor LTE connection experience ) - I'm just perusing the emulator at http://eu.draytek.com:12927/

You don't say what type of VPN you are using - I believe the VPN 'Server' responds on all WAN ports, apart from for SSL VPN (where you can manually choose which one(s)).
Ditto - 'Dynamic DNS' support - you have to specify which WAN connection's IP address is sent to the DDNS service.

Thanks! That all sounds positive and very do-able. I'll give it a shot later this week. Thanks for your help.

Update: Set up the Starlink yesterday on WAN 1, set to bridge mode. Left the LTE SIMs in place and unchanged. Load balancing seems to be enabled by default. Machines on the network reporting much increased internet speeds, so the Starlink is definitely being used. DDNS still correctly updating with the IP address provided by the mobile operator. And I can connect to the VPN from home. All good.