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.
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.
Sure, but my reply was specific to the parent comment about Unifi though.
Most people who buy into the Ubiquiti/UniFi world want to keep within that ecosystem wherever possible, the integration between components is very good, it's just that some bits are vastly more expensive than they should really be.
A generic $20 4G dongle won't be as easy to integrate nor report as many shiny metrics as a UniFi component.
Right now I've got better things to spend the $480 difference on but if I had a lot more disposable income I wouldn't need to think twice about ordering the UniFi specific bit that's mostly fit and forget.
> Starlink only makes sense as a last resort if LTE coverage is not available in your area.
Again, the point is that LTE coverage can also disappear for exactly the same reasons why the primary FTTP/DOCSIS connection disappears. It's still reliant on local power and backhaul. Starlink has no local dependencies as long as you've got your own UPSes.
Many people who really want to be sure they have Internet will probably go FTTP/DOCSIS -> 4G/5G dongle -> Starlink.
My on-call plan is: FTTP Broadband -> 5G hotspot on mobile -> wifi in local cafe -> co-working space (24h access)
My off-call plan is: FTTP Broadband -> pick up a book
>A generic $20 4G dongle won't be as easy to integrate nor report as many shiny metrics as a UniFi component.
Neither will Starlink.
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.
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.
https://bidb.uk/ is an awesome tool for looking at both broadband and mobile providers with good (but not perfect) coverage data for both.
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