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Starlink Mini as a failover
- haunter 7mo agoTIL 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
- olex 7mo agoApparently you get unlimited data capped at 500 kbit/s. So that would be a clear "yes".
- kkapelon 7mo agoYou can find something similar with IOT sims. And then you just need a standard 4g/5g dongle/router
- gh02t 7mo agoCare 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.
- qingcharles 7mo agoI 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.
- alexfoo 7mo agoDepending 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.
- dheera 7mo agoFor security applications where most of the image doesn't change, 500 Kbps is fine for low resolution video streaming.
- LeoPanthera 7mo ago[flagged]
- grumbelbart2 7mo ago> OP doesn't live in the US, so maybe they don't feel this quite as acutely It's the same sentiment in large parts of Europe, and a major reason for dropping Tesla sales. He actively supports right-wing, eurosceptic politics and parties in several European countries.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- tacker2000 7mo agoI agree. As much as Starlink is a technological miracle, the fact that I should finance the dealings of this man is too much. SpaceX IPO is the next in the long grift chain.
- madaxe_again 7mo ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 7mo agoSpaceX can be doing awesome things and Musk can be grifting simultaneously.
- bigfatkitten 7mo agoMusk is a piece of shit but I need to pick my battles. The only alternative available to me personally is Inmarsat BGAN, and for that I was paying $6 per MB (yes, six dollars per megabyte).
- vablings 7mo agoStarlink amazing solution to a problem that should have been solved by governments years ago, the USA has power to most homes and USPS will deliver anywhere so why do we not have the same for internet? God knows
- mynameisvlad 7mo agoI 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.
- intrasight 7mo agoWhat is the role of Unifi here? I read the article and went to their site but I still have no clue.
- lmz 7mo agoMost likely to be a router, configured to fail over.
- QuiEgo 7mo agoUnifi is one of the few consumer-grade routers that supports dual WAN.
- xoa 7mo agoWhile 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).
- pseudohadamard 7mo agoAnother 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.
- kkapelon 7mo agoUsing 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.
- prism56 7mo agoYup, 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.
- dazc 7mo agoVery 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.
- benbenben 7mo ago[dead]
- rjh29 7mo agoIs that £49 a month, or £49 for the 500GB data? Sounds useful!
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- 1a527dd5 7mo ago[flagged]
- lijok 7mo agoI guarantee you, you’re giving money to people much worse than him every time you shop, without realizing it.
- jaapz 7mo agoYeah but that doesn't mean that you should give money to people where you know for sure they suck? For all other cases, you can still try to not give money to people who suck by going for fair trade products and stuff like that.
- locknitpicker 7mo ago> I guarantee you, you’re giving money to people much worse than him every time you shop, without realizing it. Your assumption lies on the "without realizing it". If you realize how bad the people are, you can do something about it. The likes of Musk are extremely bad, and have been personally responsible for many, many abhorrent developments in both national and foreign stages. Thus, it's natural that people avoid anything which is directly and indirectly tied to the likes of Elon Musk. Don't you agree?
- alt227 7mo ago> If you realize how bad the people are, you can do something about it. The problem is you have no idea what people are invested in what companies. How do you know that when you shop at $friendlySustainableCompany that people like Musk do not have shares there?
- locknitpicker 7mo ago> The problem is you have no idea what people are invested in what companies. That's not an argument that justifies in any way ignoring the people you do know. Do you think it's ok to ignore the far-right activist who has been deeply involved in election fraud?
- bob1029 7mo agoI 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).
- JimmyBiscuit 7mo agoIt 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.
- forinti 7mo agoI 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!
- SV_BubbleTime 7mo agoThis entirely. “I like docsis”… cool, it turns to fiber 500ft after your house.
- kotaKat 7mo agoGotta 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!"
- icedchai 7mo agoI 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.
- merpkz 7mo agoMan, 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
- Reubend 7mo agoA 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.
- lxgr 7mo agoTFA 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).
- antonkochubey 7mo agoSounds way too high to me, I am paying €8.80/month for unlimited 5G, calls and texting
- alexfoo 7mo agoEvery 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.
- lxgr 7mo ago> 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)?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- thedanbob 7mo agoI 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- zzyzxd 7mo agoI 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.
- nine_k 7mo ago(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".)
- toomuchtodo 7mo agoI 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.
- rrr_oh_man 7mo agoHow do you do that in a mesh?
- toomuchtodo 7mo agoHeadscale https://github.com/juanfont/headscale https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
- stinkbeetle 7mo agoA VPN?
- toomuchtodo 7mo ago
- fortranfiend 7mo agoI 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.
- lithocarpus 7mo agoSame, 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.
- nickcw 7mo agoI 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.
- heraldgeezer 7mo agoWhatever 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.
- arjie 7mo agoWe'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.
- syntaxing 7mo agoThe 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.
- mholt 7mo agoYeah but if you need Internet failover, cell phone towers are likely flooded. Starlink will be much more available (probably).
- baby_souffle 7mo agoThis 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.
- rlt 7mo agoThe vast majority of Starlink satellites do have laser interconnect now. They started launching them in 2021 or 2022 I believe.
- madaxe_again 7mo agoOr 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.
- Boss0565 7mo agoI have no desire to give Elon Musk any money.
- sayamqazi 7mo agoIf you are from USA and pay tax Govt has likely put some money into things done by Elon
- dmitrygr 7mo agoAnd 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)
- speakbits 7mo agoI 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.
- asdefghyk 7mo agoBe aware of rain fade. Unit is only rated to operate up to 50 C Hail impact protection for antenna ?
- madaxe_again 7mo agoI 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.
- szszrk 7mo agoYou phrase it like it's some insane requirements, but is asking for an outdoor antenna to survive *rain* such a huge ask?
- madaxe_again 7mo agoIt’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.
- asdefghyk 6mo agoIt gets signal attenuation from heavy rain. Rain attenuation of certain RF is a well known phenomena.
- functional_dev 6mo agoright, 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
- asdefghyk 6mo ago
- dboreham 7mo agoI 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.
- corford 7mo agoI'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
- mrlinx 7mo agoyou must be around leiria? :D
- corford 7mo agoSouth of there but yup was Kristin that caused the fiber damage.
- JonChesterfield 7mo agoSomething similar here but aggregated instead of failover, see openmptcprouter or diy equivalent.
- blinded 7mo agoDo the same thing with an edge router x and 4g pay as you go t-mobile mifi.
- obayesshelton 7mo agoJack, 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.
- muskstinks 7mo ago[dead]