Comment by Reubend
1 day ago
A mobile failover would be cheaper and would give you better connectivity in heavy rain.
A 4G dongle can be purchased for $15, rather than $200 for a Starlink Mini. Then, let's say your main internet source fails and you need to actually use the backup plan beyond the standby amount of 0.5 Mbps. That will cost you a minimum of $50 for Starlink, versus roughly $25 for a month of unlimited cell service. As for standby costs, you can find phone plans for $5 per month tat give a small amount of fast data, as opposed to Starlink's unlimited amount of slow data.
But of course this only works for areas that actually have cell service.
Yeah. I live at the base of a hill and cell service alone is pretty marginal for video or anything else requiring high bandwidth a low latency.
TFA specifically calls out not wanting to depend on 4G/5G coverage, which is anything but ubiquitous:
> It has the advantage of working pretty much anywhere with a view of the sky so no relying on mobile network coverage.
I'm also not sure if $25/month is anything close to the global average for unlimited 4G/5G data (if even available).
Sounds way too high to me, I am paying €8.80/month for unlimited 5G, calls and texting
I pay $25 for my backup 5G internet - but unlike a mobile plan, it's actually unlimited at 300mbps, and I don't have to resort to TTL shenanigans and such to use it for my whole network. It's just plugged into one of the ports on my router, and provides it with real public IPv4. Ran it for a few days when the fiber dropped out and consumed 200GB without complaint from either myself or the ISP.
I think it’s uncontroversial that cheap, unlimited 5G exists in some places.
Where on earth are you living with that kind of price point? Unreal.
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UK is a bit more expensive than that but not silly.
I can get close to £10/mo but that's because I'm already paying that carrier ~£30/mo for two separate SIMs (mine and my kid's).
The £9/mo deal offered below is just half price for 6 months, it then becomes £18/mo.
https://5g.co.uk/unlimited-data-sim/
The bottom of the page does give some details about what "unlimited data" means here in the UK between the different carriers. Some cap speeds, some monitor usage and then either turf you off on "fair use" grounds or do traffic management/shaping. The general rule seems to be 650GB in 6 months is just about the limit of what is ok.
That wouldn't be anywhere near enough for me. Looking at my router I see I've downloaded 522GB in the last 34 days alone.
I mean it's more to do with the cool factor of using a satellite, not practical concerns. Practically a mobile failover is superior if you have coverage.
See the power outage in Iberia as a counterpoint.
Also when there's a fiber cut, it usually takes out everyone since there are frequently shared conduits or poles.
Everyone reverting to mobile usually takes everyone out.
I live a 25 minute train ride from london in a town with about 16000 residents, on a busy street 5 minutes walk from the main station.
My cell is unusable.
Three in Hitchin?
My personal mobile is on EE. My wife's is on Vodafone. My work mobile was on O2.
(We don't have a fourth device that was on Three unfortunately, otherwise we'd have all of the major carriers covered.)
There are plenty of places I've been around the UK where only one of our devices could get any kind of signal.
I live a 5 hour train ride from London and my mobile data is also unusable.
The issue is that mobile is easily overloaded if those around you are also failing over onto it. There are only so many channels available per sector. In my experience, when one of the two incumbent carriers in my area goes down, mobile is immediately useless as a backup.
Does Starlink have the bandwidth to avoid the same failure mode, or is it just that few people are using it for that purpose yet?
Starlink seems to provision capacity by locking your service to one address at a time; presumably, this means they have enough capacity for the customers in each physical area. By contrast, mobile networks have to contend with highly mobile terminals and highly volatile demand.
I would wager that today’s Starlink is better able to cope during a fixed line outage in an area simply because they at least have already provisioned capacity for the subscribers in that area, whereas mobile operators operate closer to capacity limits at all times and do not have the ability to scale when everyone is tethering suddenly.
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If you're in a rural area (and heck, even in an urban era) the primary ISP of a region dropping is likely to cause a lot of congestion from cellphones falling back to the operator network.
I found it quite absurd that Spectrum (my cable operator) wants to sell me a modem with integrated 5G/4G backup knowing that as soon as the cable plant drops, hundreds of local phones are going to congest the network as well and my "Invincible WiFi(tm)" will end up dead as a dodo.
I'll just throw a Peplink up and throw the cable and Starlink into it and run that as my load balancer.
I noticed the pattern. 5G disappears when ISP is down. Everyone WFH trying to get on I guess.
> A mobile failover would be cheaper and would give you better connectivity in heavy rain.
When I was living in the rural seaside (literally grapes growing in front of the sea: nice place), when a bad electricity outage would happen it'd take down everything, including the only cell tower we'd be connected to. So no Internet, no mobile phone. No nothing but the laptop's batteries.
There are also people who have the same ISP as the company giving them their phone number: about a year ago in my country (highly modern, western EU country) a major carrier went down for a few hours. Electricity kept working but all the people on that ISP and mobile phone carrier were sorry out of luck. Most shops couldn't accept payments anymore (except cash but people don't use that much here).
Failover on mobile is, for many, the same thing as no failover at all: you may as well not even bother.
Satellite failover, on the other hand, is quite harder to disrupt.
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