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Comment by Reubend | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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