4 ms·

I plan to work and travel in Europe for 1.5 months this summer and I hope they will release it soon. Hotel/AirBnB wifi is often unstable and unreliable - you ne

I plan to work and travel in Europe for 1.5 months this summer and I hope they will release it soon. Hotel/AirBnB wifi is often unstable and unreliable - you never know if Zoom will work or not. With Starlink I will have backup and at minimum will be able to take calls in the car. We will have rental car so planned to get regular Starlink but this one will be much better option.

hamandcheese 2y ago
Where do you plan to place it while staying at a hotel?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jonah 2y ago
Depends on where you're planning on going, but if you're talking Airbnb/ hotel it's probably Urban or suburban, you could probably just get a local SIM card and use the hotspot feature on your phone. We traveled around Columbia for a month this year, and was able to work from 90% of the places we were in using the hotspot. And we were pretty rural a lot of the time.
sschueller 2y ago
I would think in Europe even on the top of Jungfraujoch you will have better performance from a 5G link.
- samastur 2y ago
  Not in Scotland it won't.
  - sfeng 2y ago
    Where in Scotland? There’s 5G almost everywhere.
    - corint 2y ago
      5G almost everywhere? In Scotland? I respectfully beg to differ. There are massive chunks of Scotland which have no cellular reception at all. There are many places where there is service from some-but-not-all providers. Of those places, there are a few where the service is glacial in performance. Example: if you stop at The Green Welly Stop in Tyndrum (FK20 8RY), you'll have coverage from only two of the mobile networks. Vodafone and o2 have a coverage patch there. Have a look at the coverage maps (bidb.uk aggregates them all). It's absolutely patchy, and certainly not contiguous.
- hylaride 2y ago
  Europe's cell phone qualities vary a lot by country. Even in western Europe, some surprising countries(1) have absolutely terrible networks. As a Canadian we have some very expensive mobile plans, but our network speeds are mostly very usable in 95% of the places I'll ever end up (I routinely stream netflix/youtube/etc on the train between Toronto and Montreal). (1) I'm looking at you Germany, where my connection between Hamburg and Berlin was mostly edge and my LTE connections in the cities were barely useable. I even switched local SIMs from T-mobile to Vodafone because it was so terrible, but was the same result.
  - trompetenaccoun 2y ago
    The German mobile network is a joke. Many developing countries have better coverage.
- mbrain 2y ago
  I travel in a campervan a lot and Germany's 4G coverage is the reason I had to buy Starlink.
sofixa 2y ago
Depending on what you mean by "Europe" (Madrid? Waldhufen? A bunch of cabins in the north of Sweden? A random beach on Rhodes?), 4G/5G coverage is pretty good. Local SIMs are usually affordable, and thanks to the EU, roaming comes with a lot of things included. As a reference, I have a 20eur/month pay as you go plan from Free (France) that gets me unlimited 5G, calls, messages in France, and unlimited calls and messages + 30GB internet in the whole of the EU + a bunch of other countries. Cheaper, more reliable, more useful, faster.
- dfadsadsf 2y ago
  That's what I did last summer and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. If you are on 5G, in 20% of cases it works really well, in 60% of cases other people on the call can tell that your connection is not fiber but overall it's ok, and in 20% of cases Zoom just does not work and you can't have productive conversation. Hotel wifi is 50/50 - sometimes works, some times does not regardless of the price. I stayed in $400/day Mariott with crappiest wifi imaginable (after paying for Premium internet I got unstable 5MB).
- SXX 2y ago
  I can confirm Free offer is pretty good. Just keep in mind that after some time outside of France (like 6 month?) sim will stop working, but you can of course always register new one. Also anyone can buy and activate Free esim outside of France.
  - Scoundreller 2y ago
    Need a system where I can put my physical SIM card into a serial convertor and it “plugs” into a phone located in some other country so it can ping elsewhere every once in a while. Dunno if providers will pick up on me teleporting around. Maybe the better way is some kind of 700mhz repeater-over-IP.

hamandcheese 2y ago

Where do you plan to place it while staying at a hotel?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

jonah 2y ago

Depends on where you're planning on going, but if you're talking Airbnb/ hotel it's probably Urban or suburban, you could probably just get a local SIM card and use the hotspot feature on your phone. We traveled around Columbia for a month this year, and was able to work from 90% of the places we were in using the hotspot. And we were pretty rural a lot of the time.

sschueller 2y ago

I would think in Europe even on the top of Jungfraujoch you will have better performance from a 5G link.

samastur 2y ago
Not in Scotland it won't.
- sfeng 2y ago
  Where in Scotland? There’s 5G almost everywhere.
  - corint 2y ago
    5G almost everywhere? In Scotland? I respectfully beg to differ. There are massive chunks of Scotland which have no cellular reception at all. There are many places where there is service from some-but-not-all providers. Of those places, there are a few where the service is glacial in performance. Example: if you stop at The Green Welly Stop in Tyndrum (FK20 8RY), you'll have coverage from only two of the mobile networks. Vodafone and o2 have a coverage patch there. Have a look at the coverage maps (bidb.uk aggregates them all). It's absolutely patchy, and certainly not contiguous.
hylaride 2y ago
Europe's cell phone qualities vary a lot by country. Even in western Europe, some surprising countries(1) have absolutely terrible networks. As a Canadian we have some very expensive mobile plans, but our network speeds are mostly very usable in 95% of the places I'll ever end up (I routinely stream netflix/youtube/etc on the train between Toronto and Montreal). (1) I'm looking at you Germany, where my connection between Hamburg and Berlin was mostly edge and my LTE connections in the cities were barely useable. I even switched local SIMs from T-mobile to Vodafone because it was so terrible, but was the same result.
- trompetenaccoun 2y ago
  The German mobile network is a joke. Many developing countries have better coverage.
mbrain 2y ago
I travel in a campervan a lot and Germany's 4G coverage is the reason I had to buy Starlink.

sofixa 2y ago

Depending on what you mean by "Europe" (Madrid? Waldhufen? A bunch of cabins in the north of Sweden? A random beach on Rhodes?), 4G/5G coverage is pretty good. Local SIMs are usually affordable, and thanks to the EU, roaming comes with a lot of things included. As a reference, I have a 20eur/month pay as you go plan from Free (France) that gets me unlimited 5G, calls, messages in France, and unlimited calls and messages + 30GB internet in the whole of the EU + a bunch of other countries. Cheaper, more reliable, more useful, faster.

dfadsadsf 2y ago
That's what I did last summer and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. If you are on 5G, in 20% of cases it works really well, in 60% of cases other people on the call can tell that your connection is not fiber but overall it's ok, and in 20% of cases Zoom just does not work and you can't have productive conversation. Hotel wifi is 50/50 - sometimes works, some times does not regardless of the price. I stayed in $400/day Mariott with crappiest wifi imaginable (after paying for Premium internet I got unstable 5MB).
SXX 2y ago
I can confirm Free offer is pretty good. Just keep in mind that after some time outside of France (like 6 month?) sim will stop working, but you can of course always register new one. Also anyone can buy and activate Free esim outside of France.
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  Need a system where I can put my physical SIM card into a serial convertor and it “plugs” into a phone located in some other country so it can ping elsewhere every once in a while. Dunno if providers will pick up on me teleporting around. Maybe the better way is some kind of 700mhz repeater-over-IP.