Starlink Mini as a failover | Hacker News Reader

Starlink Mini as a failover

jackpearce.co.uk

324 pointsjkpe229 comments

I have a GL.iNet travel router. When I am not travel, it connects to the router's second WAN port. If my main internet goes down, it takes me 30 seconds to tether my phone and failover manually. My carrier detects and throttles hotspot traffic by measuring packets TTL, so I tweaks the router's iptables to dodge that. Typically I get over 400 Mbps.

From time to time I get the itch to improve my home network uptime, and I have to keep reminding myself that the current setup is fine.

(Tangential, regarding GL.Net routers: I find it satisfying that these routers run OpenWRT out of the box, and top the "Travel routers" category on Amazon: "Overall Pick" and "Amazon's Choice".)

I run several GL.Net routers in a mesh across two continents, some have Starlink and cellular, some on regular ol' fiber. They are bulletproof, highly recommend.

How do you do that in a mesh?

Headscale

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

A VPN?

A wireguard tunnel from every router to every other router. Software defined network stack.

It's probably because usually normal people don't but routers because they get them included in their internet subscription. So the people buying them have a specific reason to that normal routers don't do

It's a travel router which power users buy to get good connectivity away from home and office. An hotel won't offer you that (and chances are that they'll try to rip you off on their wifi).

Assuming you can find an Ethernet port to supply it, that is. Most hotels don't make them easy to find and use, if they even have them.

More common is that you use the travel router to connect to hotel WiFi and then share out that connection. It's slower than using directly, but it's great for family travel since you can name your travel SSID the same as your home network - all your usual devices will connect automatically, and will use any whole-connection VPN you have set up (most of the gl.inets will do Wireguard, OpenVPN, and Tailscale that I know of straight out of the box, and they will let you into luci or via SSH to configure the underlying OpenWRT directly for anything else). And, of course, it's just one device for hotels that try to limit the number of devices you use.

As far as travel and hotel goes, another huge benefit is that the router enables devices without captive portal support, on a recent trip I can use: - Fi base station for my dogs trackers (huge for me) - FireTV stick (no need to trust hotel streaming apps will clear your credentials like they claim)

Also I can WireGuard back home automatically for select IP ranges (no need to configure WireGuard separately on many of my devices)

Is your phone connected to the router through a cable or wirelessly?

They can do both - cable or bluetooth. Don't think wifi

> My carrier detects and throttles hotspot traffic by measuring packets TTL, so I tweaks the router's iptables to dodge that.

Could you elaborate on this?

I have a friend that is also curious. Their fibre cable was cut by addicts trying to find a source of copper that took a few days to be repaired. Using their hot spot during the outage used up their allotted hot spot bandwidth for the month. My friend would be very interested in how to avoid potential down time in the future.

Might I suggest an email address added to your HN profile, lest a publicly posted reply result in observation by a nefarious telecom employee who just might obviate the proposed solution to your friend’s conundrum.

Are we back to this again? I have a friend who wants to know how to build a blue box.

One step from ‘SWIM tried meth and he’s freaking out’ from the old forums !

TTL++l0l

Sure, it's widely known.

Default TTL is usually 64.

Phone traffic TTL is 64.

But when behind the phone-as-router/gateway, compy traffic TTL is...63!

Thanks!

Some mobile phone providers check the packet TTL to limit tethering.

Network packets commonly have start with default TTL values of 64, 128, or 255. Each hop in the network subtracts 1.

When phone connects direct to carrier (cell tower, I assume) the carrier will see TTL of 64.

A laptop tethered to a phone introduces a hop so laptop-to-phone TTL is 64, phone-to-carrier TTL is 63.

Carriers can then limit bandwidth if network packet that don't have a common TTL.

For `iptables` look at `--ttl-inc 1` (to add back the 1 so 63 => 64) or `--ttl-set 64`.

Alternatively, you set the tethered devices to use a TTL of 65, e.g. linux/mac `sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=65`

How do you figure out what detection method a carrier is using?

Make the TTL change , and see if traffic bw changes?

Thank you for explaining this, I had always wondered how a carrier could tell a device was tethered if a router was not passing on tethered device details.

If the hotspot is sourced from the phone, the phone tells the carrier

Another way to do it is to look for requests to domains that phones never access but desktops/laptops often do. Windows Update is the most common, but you could probably do apt package repositories or whatever.

Thanks!

You can easily manipulate and set TTL to whatever is needed with a Mikrotik router. Override TTL for all devices behind it.

/ip firewall mangle add chain=postrouting out-interface=lte1 action=change-ttl new-ttl=set:64 passthrough=yes comment="Set TTL for Mobile Hotspot"

I have AT&T Fiber and 99% of the time it's fantastic, but there are several instances of 30-60 second downtime a day and I have a 5G modem with a Google Fi data sim as a backup. Failover is nearly-instant with a Unifi UDM.

The data sim costs nothing extra on top of my cellular plan and just counts towards my (already very generous) monthly limit of 50GB.

Out of curiosity what carrier are you using?

Pulled the thread on this a bit and it seems that it will be highly carrier-dependent and will likely be flakey if it works at all.

TTL is one of the simplest methods carriers use to detect if there's an extra hop but very unlikely to be their only line of defense against methods like this.

I also do this. Xfinity went out for a few hours earlier this month and Unifi failed over almost instantly, and within minutes we had high speed internet once I upgraded us. The standby mode would have been plenty for basic web browsing, too.

$5/mo for pretty guaranteed connectivity, plus being able to take it around with me on travels is pretty awesome.

What is the role of Unifi here? I read the article and went to their site but I still have no clue.

Most likely to be a router, configured to fail over.

Unifi is one of the few consumer-grade routers that supports dual WAN.

While the GUI and other polish certainly makes it more approachable then many I wouldn't really call it "consumer-grade", it's definitely into prosumer/SMB territory. And in that market there are thankfully a number of solid competitors fwiw, both directly the exact same head to head niche (Omada), more disjoint but sometimes higher value deals like Mikrotik, and open source solutions focused on embedded (like OpenWRT) or ones like OPNsense that will run on a vast array of PC hardware. Failover should be pretty straight forward on all of them, whatever is being used for routing just needs at least three network ports (2 or more for WAN, 1 or more for LAN).

Another slightly-above-consumer-grade device is the Firewalla. It works really well, the only time I even notice it's failed over is (a) when I get an alert on the phone and (b) search engine results start coming up in Spanish.

Same remark here. This reads more like paid promotion for UniFi than anything. It should be mentioned that any Linux box can trivially accommodate multiple WAN interfaces. You don't need to pay the UniFi tax for this.

People like unifi because it’s relatively easy to configure. My Netgear R7000 from at least a decade ago running Fresh Tomato firmware will also happily let you have 1-4 WAN interfaces depending on how many of its Ethernet ports you want to dedicate. It won’t let you use all 5 ports for WAN though!

I was paying for gigabit with the local ISP and it slowed down and lost connection so frequently I bought a Starlink (the regular one, not the mini) as a "backup."

As per the usual, my internet went down and I switched to the backup Starlink. After working with it for about a week I cancelled my ISP.

Turned out around 350MBPS down was fine for everything I was doing (and it's way more reliable).

Kinda drifting off topic, but I'm so bitter over this

My girlfriend had been paying for 1Gb fiber for about 5 years at the insistence of the rep because "You stream 4k content and use your internet for work". $110/mo or something. Verizon comes by and sets her up with a modem and an "auto-route smart 2.4GHz/5GHz" router which slots you into a frequency based on...something. Who knows because it didn't work. It just put everything on 2.4GHz.

I noticed while at her house that the internet was painfully slow downloading large files and dug into it.

For those who don't know, 2.4GHz will typically top out around 100Mbps. Around the house you're looking at closer to 50Mbps. With 5Ghz it's much better, about 500Mbps typical, but verizons awful "smart" router just put everything on 2.4GHz.

So for years she had been paying for 1Gbps, Verizon happily taking her money, while she never saw over 100Mbps. It's also not like they tell you anywhere that the router they give you will only realistically offer 1/10th your Gb speed. Such a dumpster tier company. I can only imagine there are tens of thousands being conned by this scheme.

Anyway, I put in a new router and switched to the cheapest plan. The internet is now much faster.

Also "renting" their router/modem to you is typically a bad deal. (Billing details may depend on local laws.)

Getting my own modem and router easily paid for themselves, plus I'm not arbitrarily locked out of anything.

I hate that it works so well these days. I have my antenna right out ground level between the house and trees. Absolute worst case scenario, and it's been rock solid in everything but the heaviest of rain storms for almost a year now. Still, the occasional slowdown or half-second outage really screws up Android's idiotic magic for switching between wifi and cell to the point that my pixel phone is basically useless at home. But that's more of a "google knows best" problem.

XFinity has been terrible lately, and I have a Starlink Mini. XFinity failed today, and I did fallback for a few hours on the Mini. Connectivity was actually better than fiber. If only it worked when it is cloudy -- for $50 on roaming, that's a no-brainer given the exorbitant cost of living in northern cal.

I’ve never had an issue with Starlink when it’s cloudy, or rainy for that matter. They even advertise this. Mini is different this way?

My Mini is fine unless it's a large rainstorm, +1 anecdata

Thanks for this. Can you still use it on heavy rainy days or does it come to a halt?

I have never noticed an issue but now that we’re talking about it I realize It’s never occurred to me to run a speed test during a heavy downpour. Which might tell you something positive by itself. Next time I will do so but it might be a while; my rain season has ended.

Good to know. Thank you!

How likely is it that this $5 deal will continue in the future? It sounds like a no-brainer WAN backup option, are Starlink going to discontinue it when they realise that people are using it as such?

Also, is this available globally or UK-only? I can't find any mention of it on the local Starlink site.

It's $5 for every month where you don't actually use it. If they are still subsidizing the hardware cost, that's probably where that money goes. If you actually use it you pay regular price for that month

I don't see how this would be a bad deal for Starlink

It's in available on most plans in most locations, with some restrictions described here: https://starlink.com/ca/support/article/37bb3b47-9525-7224-5...

Well you are actually using it, just at 500kbps. Oh, we used to DREAM of 500kbps. Would have been lightspeed to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip with a 9600bps dialup modem, IF WE WERE LUCKY!

I've just done something similar in response to a heavy storm that's taken out the fiber where I live (7 weeks now, still hasn't been reconnected). Starlink has been a life saver and works flawlessly (~200Mbps, <35ms latency) but I've also added a cheap 4G data SIM in to the mix too for extra resilience (no 5G coverage where I am but 4G gets ~45Mbs with an external antenna).

Had to get this going quickly so used tplink gear as it was readily accessible and surprisingly it's worked quite well. Used an NX210 (for WiFi to house and the backup 4G sim). Connected the NX210's WAN to an ER605, with Starlink router in WAN1 (in bypass mode) and fiber router in WAN2. This gives me instant fail over across all three and the option of load balancing across fiber and starlink (whenever the fiber comes back). Last step was to get an EAP211 so I could share my starlink over to a neighbour who also lost their fiber after the storm. That has worked well too.

* I'm using a residential starlink plan with the full dish (not mini), mounted with their pipe adapter accessory

you must be around leiria? :D

South of there but yup was Kristin that caused the fiber damage.

Something similar here but aggregated instead of failover, see openmptcprouter or diy equivalent.

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.

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 think it’s uncontroversial that cheap, unlimited 5G exists in some places.

Some places = Most of the developed world

Where on earth are you living with that kind of price point? Unreal.

Italy, France and Spain have 200GB+ plans for 10€. Romania reportedly has unlimited for 4€ but I don't know which operator.

US plans just aren't comparable as they've been historically f'd with astronomical monthly payments.

> Romania reportedly has unlimited for 4€ but I don't know which operator.

Orange Yoxo is the only one which has actually-unlimited, all the others have a fine-print somewhere with "up to X GB/month, then bandwidth is severely throttled".

I'm using the 4.9€ plan for a mountain webcam[1] and they have been true to their word, no throttling so far.

[1] https://ignis.maramures.io/

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.

Do you expect your main broadband connection to be out for a month? An hour is unusual enough.

This was in the context of replacing broadband with a 5G dongle.

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 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.

Wouldn't a widespread ground-based infrastructure outage also take out (or at least severely degrade) Starlink in the affected region if people were to widely use it as a backup solution?

Starlink has been known to carry traffic over lasers from Southern Africa to Europe and from New Zealand to Eastern USA. During the power outage in Spain/Portugal they proactively moved traffic to the UK

Local failures don't matter unless your country doesn't allow landing user traffic in other countries (Indonesia, Bangladesh)

Why does coverage matter... when you know perfectly well if you have decent 5G coverage at the location of your fibre router?

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.

Managing wireless at a large corporate campus we’re tucked away far enough we have a couple cell towers for the operators on site.

If our site wireless dies, it’s a near instant logjam as we watch 1500 phones and cellular devices on our WiFi alone dump back to the macro network for data to the sole tower on campus.

Out of hand management also becomes an immediate nightmare in this scenario when we need to swim upstream of the phones.

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.

Three is now owned by Vodafone, so soon (when they sort the technicals) you will be on all the major carriers!

I live a 5 hour train ride from London and my mobile data is also unusable.

Yeah, change networks.

I'm currently on Three. I tried both EE and O2, same issue sadly. Not tried Vodafone.

> 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.

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.

I don't think mobility matters during a broadband outage. The problem is people failing over to cellular. (If anything, mobile terminals may require cellular providers to provision extra headroom, which helps during an outage.)

Starlink will have the same problem unless it provisions extra capacity for users on standby plans. The plan is so cheap that I can't imagine they're provisioning much.

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.

I'm currently using 4G as a backup and the Starlink Standby plan would definitely be cheaper. Only by a few dollars, but still cheaper, and unlike the cellular plan there's unlimited bandwidth while with the cell plan I'm relying on rollover data accumulating during periods of non-use to cover when it's being used.

The use case varies but for what it’s worth, most major cellular provider in the US offer fallback Internet plans. Ranges from 10-20 a month depending if you already have a line with them. AT&T has an interesting one where your phone lines hotspot is free and unthrottled whenever your fiber is impacted.

Yeah but if you need Internet failover, cell phone towers are likely flooded. Starlink will be much more available (probably).

This too depends on which POP/ground station you're landing at.

Maybe less so once the majority of starling satellites are capable of laser communications to route your traffic down to a less saturated ground station.

The vast majority of Starlink satellites do have laser interconnect now. They started launching them in 2021 or 2022 I believe.

Or they’re just offline, because their backup batteries only last a few hours, and the gensets for the backhaul have run out of diesel. Iberian blackout last year, I didn’t even know it had happened until I went to pick the kid up from school - just another day at the home office.

I prefer having a 2nd wired connection as my backup. The satellite connection has some clear benefits, but it's still going to outer space. A DOCSIS failover won't suffer from rain fade or a something landing on the antenna.

If I've got a situation so bad it takes out both of my connections I've probably got bigger things to deal with than internet access.

The buried fiber getting cut by is really the only thing that kills the connection. Fiber can go for a long time without power from the local grid infrastructure. My cable provider has a mostly orthogonal failure mode (goes down like clockwork with the grid).

It honestly has to be very strong rain for it to create connection issues. I dont know where you live but here in germany we have that maybe once or twice a year with our antenna.

I have a second fiber connection and found out recently that both fibers come along the same route and when a fire took out a utility pole, I lost both connections.

I then found out that all providers bar one (there are 5 or 6) come along the same street.

So if you are going to go with this option choose carefully your providers!

This entirely.

“I like docsis”… cool, it turns to fiber 500ft after your house.

Gotta love the new suckered generation of "Fiber-Powered With Asterisks Internet" being advertised by the cablecos. "Fiber powered and delivered to the home by HFC!"

I dumped DOCSIS the moment fiber became available. With cable, I'd go through periods of 1% to 3% packet loss. It also affected the neighbors, so it wasn't my "old modem" as the tech once tried to claim. When it was at its worst, I saw my upstream bandwidth drop below 100kbits/sec due to all the TCP retransmissions.

Eventually they admitted it was an "outside plant" issue and beyond the responsibility of the home techs. It took months to finally get it fixed. Who knew if it was actually fixed, or it was just a fluke, since the problems would come and go.

Even when it worked, upstream was capped at 30 megabits/sec, which was pretty painful for large uploads.

Fiber has none of these problems.

Five or six! My kingdom for one fiber provider.

Might be shared infrastructure

I'm sure they must share some infrastructure, especially the small local providers, but after the fire there were a dozen vans parked outside, each putting up new cables.

So at that point, each one has its own cables.

We've used this in San Francisco to great effect. Once the Internet went down and I took our portable battery to the roof with the Mini and my wife was only a few minutes on her phone hotspot before she was able to have meetings normally. Great functionality.

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.

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.

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...

I had no idea consumers were being so ripped off lol.

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.

Unifi has Starlink integrations in the beta software. Don't know if it's been made final

When here is local power outage and everyone switches to 4g/5g, it is overwhelmed and unusable.

And the local power outage takes out the 4g/5g mast too.

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.

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 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.

I was looking at the Standby plan a few months ago. There was some talk as to needing to activate it to full speed and price at least once per year or pay an extra fee which makes it a lot less attractive.

TIL standby mode. Is that enough to operate a remote webcam? Not real time video feed but say uploading a photo every 1 minute or so

Apparently you get unlimited data capped at 500 kbit/s. So that would be a clear "yes".

You can find something similar with IOT sims. And then you just need a standard 4g/5g dongle/router

Care to point me to it? The best I can find searching a bit with unlimited data is capped to 64 kbps for $100/yr, which is quite a bit worse.

I haven't checked, but see what good2gomobile.com offer on their plans if you pay for a year. I'm on the $5/mo plan for my primary cellphone.

Depending on a whole bunch of things but a 200KB photo once a minute might be in the realms of LoRa. You could get the data out for free.

The 500Kbps of Starlink would be close enough for a 500KB photo every 10 seconds or so assuming typical packet overheads.

For security applications where most of the image doesn't change, 500 Kbps is fine for low resolution video streaming.

I live pretty rural and starlink has been worth the price over the last few years. When you compare it to dialup or hughesnet or viasat, it just works.

Same, right now it's great. I imagine we'll get enshittification soon enough when starlink gets enough lock in, but right now it's good.

Man, that 500kbit/s is quite generous for that price, can easily be used to access CCTV cameras in remote areas. I currently use LTE for that and it's 10 eur for 15GB data cap per month for that use case

> Set IPv6 Connection to SLAAC (this is critical - SLAAC must be used, not DHCPv6) [...] Set 'Prefix Delegation Size' to 56

Is this also A UniFi bug, is Starlink doing IPv6 address assignment in a weird way, or is this a normal/RFC-compliant way of assigning a /56 subnet to a router?

I always assumed routeable prefixes on v6 require DHCPv6 (except for hacks like RFC 7278 and /64 subnets)?

I think that section left out some details. On my Unifi setup, the router's IPv6 connection is configured with DHCPv6 (SLAAC isn't even an option) while the local networks are configured with SLAAC.

Be aware of rain fade. Unit is only rated to operate up to 50 C Hail impact protection for antenna ?

I mean, if you’re planning on using it in Death Valley on a rainy day, sure, you might have some problems. Also it doesn’t brush your teeth for you.

You phrase it like it's some insane requirements, but is asking for an outdoor antenna to survive *rain* such a huge ask?

It’s absolutely fine with rain, even absolutely torrential tropical downpours - from experience - I don’t know what you’re talking about. Has been sat up on my (black) roof for four years now, not a hitch - and it has seen -15 to 45C, snow, rain, wildfire, 1” hail, and it’s fine. Only service interruption we’ve had was when starlink accidentally the entire network for 8 hours or so last year.

Also it doesn’t fold my laundry.

It gets signal attenuation from heavy rain. Rain attenuation of certain RF is a well known phenomena.

right, attenuation is particularly bad with Starlink because it operates in the Ku and Ka bands... wavelengths are small enough to be scattered by individual raindrops

Where I live hailstorms are not unusual. However recent hailstorms often have ice hailstones where up to 3cm diameter (golf ball size) and some locations experience giant hailstones which are above 5cm and bigger. In the most recent storm my car was outside and was "written Off" by insurance company. Every panel of glass destroyer - both front and back windscreens and side windows and mirrors. all metal panels had numerous dents. roof rack bars destroyed too.

RE "...planning on using it in Death Valley....."

Would be easy for unit to go over 50 C due to combination of heat from the sun and heat generated from the electronics. Where I am, temperatures of 30 C are common - in the shade.

I use Starlink as a backup provider, have done loads of work to tunnel public IPs via it, automatically fail over traffic etc, yet had no idea they supported public IPv6 subnets until reading this article.

I wish I had an excuse to actually need this much uptime at home. It's not the hardest thing to jump over to my phone as hotspot the very few times I need it to work.

Whatever one might think about Elon Musk's posts on X, the engineering and achievements coming out of SpaceX are genuinely extraordinary and deserve a lot of respect.

Jack, not sure why but I love your writing / site.

Reminds me of the good old days of the internet.

I also migrated to Starlink recently and quite like the service so far.

Do the same thing with an edge router x and 4g pay as you go t-mobile mifi.

Every so often I do the numbers on a backup Internet connection and decide that it's not worth it, but understand that it is useful for peace of mind reasons. My Internet is just too reliable. When I'm out of contract with my current provider I'll need to reconsider this as the supplier I'm likely to move to has no obvious/simple/integrated backup option.

tl;dr FTTP. A single outage event in 16 months, lasted 40 minutes, whilst asleep.

I'm in the UK and have FTTP through BT. Way back when I also purchased the 4G backup option (Hybrid Connect) that comes with this service. That's an extra £7.50/mo when taken as part of the usual 24-month contract. It's simple to setup and doesn't require any specific maintenance.

Looking back at the logs it's clear (from an actual usage perspective) it's not been worth the £7.50/mo I've been paying for it, but I'll admit it helped give me peace of mind when I was on-call for work so it is easy to justify.

The BT supplied router (which is required if you want to use their 4G backup hardware) keeps a log of "Resilience events".

In the 16 months I've had FTTP it has had exactly one "resilience event". A 40m11s outage that started at 00:20:05 on 28/11/2025. I was unaware of this outage as I was asleep.

It was really useful when I moved house though. I was in the middle of a 24-month contract with BT at my old address so I ported my contract to my new address. This meant they had to come round and install FTTP at the new property, which they couldn't do for a couple of weeks, so I was without home Internet for these two weeks.

Luckily the 4G "Hybrid Connect" backup device wasn't geo-locked (or if it was maybe BT overlooked it given there was an outstanding "Moving house" order on the account) and so it worked perfectly for the ~2 weeks between moving in and FTTP being installed. If this hadn't worked then a temporary 4G router would have worked just as well.

I had a bunch of "resilience events" for this period (it wasn't one continuous event as I was moving/restarting the broadband router for various reasons). During those 13 days the logs show 163GB download and 25GB upload. That's an average of ~150KBps (note the capital B there, in bits-per-second it is ~1.1Mbps) download.

In the 26 months prior to moving (where I was on ~75Mbps FTTC with BT) I had 3 "resilience events". 17m36s, 47m7s, 31m22s. All between midnight and 4am where I wouldn't have noticed, these were also within 1 month of each other, the other 25 months had no problems at all. None.

When my current contract comes to an end I'll move to a different supplier (probably Community Fibre as I can get symmetric 5Gbps for less than I'm paying BT for 1Gbps/120Mbps) and then not worry about a backup. If it is less reliable then I'll look for a solution then.

My current backup is simply to hotspot on my mobile with 5G (good signal here). Doesn't help the others in the house but they can fend for themselves. Neighbours have different suppliers or technologies (DOCSIS vs FTTP) so swapping wifi details would also be an option.

As others have pointed out, a local power-cut that takes out of the FTTP cabinet could easily take out the local 4G/5G masts making a 4G backup solution useless. If this happens I can just take my laptop to a nearby cafe or the co-working space I use. That kind of outage is very rare though round here.

Then again with the sums involved (under £10/month extra) it may just be easier (for peace of mind again) to just plump for something that doesn't really make amazing financial sense as it's just the cost of a pint or two a month.

I was with a small company called BRSK who did the FTTP rollout in my area, I think they have changed hands a few times now, but the sheer reliability was legit 5-9s. I don't legally fully understand how small companies ended up getting lots of money from the government for FTTP but they absolutely crushed it in my area. Shame they got mega review-bombed because they installed telegraph poles outside people's houses and that's apparently evil

> the sheer reliability was legit 5-9s

That made me think about mine...

a) FTTC:

25 months and only outages were 17m36s, 47m7s, 31m22s gives ~99.991

b) FTTP:

16 months and a single 40m11s outage gives ~99.994

(Both using 30 day months, the answers remain the same to 5sf even if I calculate the durations more accurately.)

I'd happily take 4 nines for residential broadband.

> I don't legally fully understand how small companies ended up getting lots of money from the government for FTTP

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/project-gigabit-uk-gigabit-progr...

I have no desire to give Elon Musk any money.

If you are from USA and pay tax Govt has likely put some money into things done by Elon

And yet again 50% of the work is working around IPv6 nonsense. I long for the day when we give up on it and try again (with proper DHCP and proper support for NAT)

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