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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

For me - backup Internet for a large-scale power outage or other event like an ice storm that knocks down telecommunication lines.

I've worked from home via the Internet since the late 90's, and having a backup has been drilled into me as a hard requirement from hard-won experience. Living in Chicago this came in handy just last year when a box truck took out my primary fiber connection and most of the block for a few days, and I failed over seamlessly to Comcast.

When/if I get approved for Starlink, I'll cancel comcast and be using it as my backup. Hopefully they become mobile soon as well, so I can take it with me on adventures.

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You can get the "RV" variant now at starlink.com/rv. It's a little bit more per month but allows roaming and turning it on and off. On the downside, it's explicitly lower priority on the network than the fixed ones.

I use 5G as a backup. It costs me only around 40 USD and includes the modem which I have attached to my router.

If you are in a city there are cheaper back solutions than starlink.

I don't think I can find 5G modem for 40USD, but I think for 40 or 45€ I could get pre-paid internet good for a year or two from all three operators here.

And at least one of those will likely work. If not, I probably don't have much power anyway.

Maybe Google Fi.

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!

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?

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).

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.

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.

Tethering to my phone is my backup.

Although it's more than a backup, I use it daily when I go sit in a park to work, or work from a cafe or whatever.

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