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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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