pfSense - Starlink Tier 1 WAN 100% packet loss every 15 minutes

I am running pfsense 24.03 on a Netgate 4100 box.

My setup is WAN1: Starlink and WAN2: Centurylink DSL. Every 15 minutes Starlink is marked down due to 100% packet loss and I failover to Centurylink. After about 2 minutes Starlink returns and I switch back to Starlink.

When I disable the WAN2 Centurylink interface, Starlink is rock solid (1% packet loss max over the last 24 hours). The moment I enable WAN2 Centurylink, I can start the countdown and WAN1 Starlink will show 100% packet loss and marked offline every 15 minutes, fail over to Centurylink, a minute or so later, fail back to Starlink.

I started over and deleted all gateways and gateway groups, disabled all policy routing rules, changed monitor IPs, disabled gateway monitoring, fiddled with thresholds for packet loss and latency, with no change in results. I factory reset (and restored from a backup) with same results.

Bottom line, Starlink works fine by itself. This is not a Starlink satellite issue. The moment I add Centurylink as a second WAN (with or with out gateway groups being created), Starlink will go offline every 15 minutes.

This is also being discussed over on the Netgate forums. At least one other person is having the exact same issue. This all began on or about 8-24-2024.

That is still enough packet loss to trigger failover. You can increase the thresholds for the trigger.

Thanks for the response. I have watched that video (a couple of times) and nearly all your pfSense videos. Your tutorials are the best and have taught me a lot (especially with pfSense)! Thank-you.

I have changed the thresholds with no help. I have also disabled gateway monitoring and Starlink WAN will still fail with 100% packet loss every 15 minutes (900 seconds).

The only correlation I can find is in the DHCP log. When I add the CenturyLink (WAN2) interface, I see this in the DHCP log:

ā€œdhclient 86826 bound to 76.0.28.79 ā€“ renewal in 900 secondsā€

The 76.0.28.79 was the CenturyLink (WAN2) IP address.

Hi. Iā€™m the other person experiencing this exact same issue. One thing I wanted to add to this discussion here was that I tried making CentruyLink the primary interface this morning and making StarLink the backup fail-over. No issues. The connection remained solid for several hours with both interfaces active. As soon as I switched it back to StarLink as primary and CenturyLink as fail-over the drops started all over again. Every 15 minutes on the exact 15 minute mark.