Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynameisvlad | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

View on HN

I was paying for gigabit with the local ISP and it slowed down and lost connection so frequently I bought a Starlink (the regular one, not the mini) as a "backup."

As per the usual, my internet went down and I switched to the backup Starlink. After working with it for about a week I cancelled my ISP.

Turned out around 350MBPS down was fine for everything I was doing (and it's way more reliable).

Kinda drifting off topic, but I'm so bitter over this

My girlfriend had been paying for 1Gb fiber for about 5 years at the insistence of the rep because "You stream 4k content and use your internet for work". $110/mo or something. Verizon comes by and sets her up with a modem and an "auto-route smart 2.4GHz/5GHz" router which slots you into a frequency based on...something. Who knows because it didn't work. It just put everything on 2.4GHz.

I noticed while at her house that the internet was painfully slow downloading large files and dug into it.

For those who don't know, 2.4GHz will typically top out around 100Mbps. Around the house you're looking at closer to 50Mbps. With 5Ghz it's much better, about 500Mbps typical, but verizons awful "smart" router just put everything on 2.4GHz.

So for years she had been paying for 1Gbps, Verizon happily taking her money, while she never saw over 100Mbps. It's also not like they tell you anywhere that the router they give you will only realistically offer 1/10th your Gb speed. Such a dumpster tier company. I can only imagine there are tens of thousands being conned by this scheme.

Anyway, I put in a new router and switched to the cheapest plan. The internet is now much faster.

Also "renting" their router/modem to you is typically a bad deal. (Billing details may depend on local laws.)

Getting my own modem and router easily paid for themselves, plus I'm not arbitrarily locked out of anything.

I hate that it works so well these days. I have my antenna right out ground level between the house and trees. Absolute worst case scenario, and it's been rock solid in everything but the heaviest of rain storms for almost a year now. Still, the occasional slowdown or half-second outage really screws up Android's idiotic magic for switching between wifi and cell to the point that my pixel phone is basically useless at home. But that's more of a "google knows best" problem.

How likely is it that this $5 deal will continue in the future? It sounds like a no-brainer WAN backup option, are Starlink going to discontinue it when they realise that people are using it as such?

Also, is this available globally or UK-only? I can't find any mention of it on the local Starlink site.

It's $5 for every month where you don't actually use it. If they are still subsidizing the hardware cost, that's probably where that money goes. If you actually use it you pay regular price for that month

I don't see how this would be a bad deal for Starlink

It's in available on most plans in most locations, with some restrictions described here: https://starlink.com/ca/support/article/37bb3b47-9525-7224-5...

Well you are actually using it, just at 500kbps. Oh, we used to DREAM of 500kbps. Would have been lightspeed to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip with a 9600bps dialup modem, IF WE WERE LUCKY!

What is the role of Unifi here? I read the article and went to their site but I still have no clue.

Most likely to be a router, configured to fail over.

Unifi is one of the few consumer-grade routers that supports dual WAN.

While 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).

Another 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.

Same remark here. This reads more like paid promotion for UniFi than anything. It should be mentioned that any Linux box can trivially accommodate multiple WAN interfaces. You don't need to pay the UniFi tax for this.

People like unifi because it’s relatively easy to configure. My Netgear R7000 from at least a decade ago running Fresh Tomato firmware will also happily let you have 1-4 WAN interfaces depending on how many of its Ethernet ports you want to dedicate. It won’t let you use all 5 ports for WAN though!

XFinity has been terrible lately, and I have a Starlink Mini. XFinity failed today, and I did fallback for a few hours on the Mini. Connectivity was actually better than fiber. If only it worked when it is cloudy -- for $50 on roaming, that's a no-brainer given the exorbitant cost of living in northern cal.

I’ve never had an issue with Starlink when it’s cloudy, or rainy for that matter. They even advertise this. Mini is different this way?

My Mini is fine unless it's a large rainstorm, +1 anecdata

Thanks for this. Can you still use it on heavy rainy days or does it come to a halt?

I have never noticed an issue but now that we’re talking about it I realize It’s never occurred to me to run a speed test during a heavy downpour. Which might tell you something positive by itself. Next time I will do so but it might be a while; my rain season has ended.

Good to know. Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com