Comment by kkapelon
1 day ago
Using a 4g/5g router is much easier and probably cheaper/power efficient.
Depending on your area you don't even need an external one. A simple 4g dongle would do.
1 day ago
Using a 4g/5g router is much easier and probably cheaper/power efficient.
Depending on your area you don't even need an external one. A simple 4g dongle would do.
That works right up until the cell tower goes down too. Then the dongle is a fancy USB decoration, and Starlink Mini, clunky as it is, still has one big advantage: your backup path isn't sharing the same failure mode, which is the whole point even if the setup are uglier and the power draw is worse.
100%. In my area unfortunately my ISP shares the same infra as my mobile provider. Many times they’ve gone out together.
There are probably cheaper options, especially if you want to literally use your smartphone as the hotspot, but the Verizon home backup internet plan I looked at recently is $20 a month (and gives you 7 24-hour periods per month of unlimited data).
The Verizon home router is included when you sign up (you have to return it if you cancel). I bought it out of desperation when my home fiber internet was down all weekend due to a local tech screwing up and unplugging my house from the breakout box on the curb, but given the cost and the normal reliability of my home internet it’s really barely worth it.
Unifi (which the OP uses) even has dedicated devices for this type of failover: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/29887153953559-UniFi-5...
Spendy though.
The Unifi 5G modem for the UK [1] is £378 (~USD500) and that's just the hardware, you still have to pay for a suitable SIM.
I can see why some people are drawn to the Starlink option at 1/3 of that price.
1. https://uk.store.ui.com/uk/en/category/internet-solutions/co...
You can get a 4g dongle with $20 for basic failover. There are also many other companies that sell cheaper 5G routers. Zte has several models.
Starlink only makes sense as a last resort if LTE coverage is not available in your area.
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When here is local power outage and everyone switches to 4g/5g, it is overwhelmed and unusable.
Again this is location specific. I have a mini ups on my router/ont. And I assume that my provider also has a UPS, because even when power is out my landline connection just works.
Cable and fiber providers typically have 24 hours of battery backup in their repeaters/concentrators but no more. Most 4g/5g stations have similar backup capacity, with only a few (that will be overwhelmed) located on big enough buildings to have standby generators.
So starlink backup is still interesting if your region occasionally has outages that last more than 24 hours.
There was a major storm that disrupted infrastructure across the west coast of Ireland last year. Turned out a lot of infrastructure couldn't survive multi-day grid power loss (water plants, cell tower repeaters, etc).
Starlink is a solid backup for mitigating the risk of such disruption by having no local dependencies other than ability to power the CPE.
And the local power outage takes out the 4g/5g mast too.
Yup, OP is from the UK. In the UK I got a ThreeUK business SIM for £49 that lasted 2 years with 500GB data. It sits in wan failover and manages about 50mbps which is perfect to keep most services running.
Very much location dependent though. I lived less than a mile from Southampton city centre for a while and could never get anything close to dial-up standard download/upload speeds. I've heard similar from London residents.
Yeah definitely. Where I am the coverage and speeds are decent on most networks.
1 reply →
Is that £49 a month, or £49 for the 500GB data? Sounds useful!
Mine was £49 one off for 500GB renewed each month for 2 years. Here's another example: https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/three-500gb-preloaded-5g-da...
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