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When my local fiber backbone was cut last year, many neighborhoods including mine lost service. Guess what happened to the 5G? I had a hotspot for backup use, a

When my local fiber backbone was cut last year, many neighborhoods including mine lost service. Guess what happened to the 5G? I had a hotspot for backup use, and it was useless. Turns out the towers use the same backbone!

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Would it make sense to have such an expensive backup system for an event that happens once every few years and is fixed in a day?
- skimo8 4y ago
  Granted I’m rural, but ours took a week and a half to get back online when a forest fire burned a microwave tower. It took out Charter cable to our house & Verizon. I am a fully remote tech worker, and this was bad (I had to work remote-remote during this time). On another topic, I have had Starlink since early 2021. A lot of the people I see complaining are not the target audience. We live 3 hrs from the nearest airport, and it’s night and day difference for everyone outside our “town” who were either using a local WISP or Hughesnet. There are more of those people out there than you think ;) IMO Starlink is not going to replace hardwired connection options or local 5G, but that’s okay. At least in the USA, there is a lot lot land not covered by cell service. I carry an Iridium messenger in the car just in case I break down in one of these areas (it has happened to me, and is not fun trying to get a tow truck).
- phil21 4y ago
  A day? Maybe not - In most cases I could simply drive somewhere for a day or two and get work done. For something that spans a week or so like my fiber outage? Worth every penny. As an employee it's my duty to have reliable "transportation" to work - in this case that means Internet access. I did use a 4G LTE hotspot when I lived in less dense suburbs - it worked quite well. In the city core though, I've found that when there is a widescale outage mobile data slows to a crawl and is unusable for work purposes. It's expensive, but when I was contracting being unable to take a sev0 on-call escalation would have cost far more in opportunity cost than paying for the backup line for a year.
- floydnoel 4y ago
  Unfortunately it was a couple weeks, not a day. And it’s pretty cheap, only $110/month for Starlink compared to $50/month for a T-Mobile hotspot that didn’t help at all during the outage.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Would it make sense to have such an expensive backup system for an event that happens once every few years and is fixed in a day?

skimo8 4y ago
Granted I’m rural, but ours took a week and a half to get back online when a forest fire burned a microwave tower. It took out Charter cable to our house & Verizon. I am a fully remote tech worker, and this was bad (I had to work remote-remote during this time). On another topic, I have had Starlink since early 2021. A lot of the people I see complaining are not the target audience. We live 3 hrs from the nearest airport, and it’s night and day difference for everyone outside our “town” who were either using a local WISP or Hughesnet. There are more of those people out there than you think ;) IMO Starlink is not going to replace hardwired connection options or local 5G, but that’s okay. At least in the USA, there is a lot lot land not covered by cell service. I carry an Iridium messenger in the car just in case I break down in one of these areas (it has happened to me, and is not fun trying to get a tow truck).
phil21 4y ago
A day? Maybe not - In most cases I could simply drive somewhere for a day or two and get work done. For something that spans a week or so like my fiber outage? Worth every penny. As an employee it's my duty to have reliable "transportation" to work - in this case that means Internet access. I did use a 4G LTE hotspot when I lived in less dense suburbs - it worked quite well. In the city core though, I've found that when there is a widescale outage mobile data slows to a crawl and is unusable for work purposes. It's expensive, but when I was contracting being unable to take a sev0 on-call escalation would have cost far more in opportunity cost than paying for the backup line for a year.
floydnoel 4y ago
Unfortunately it was a couple weeks, not a day. And it’s pretty cheap, only $110/month for Starlink compared to $50/month for a T-Mobile hotspot that didn’t help at all during the outage.