UKH

Living in the highlands with no immediate prospect of getting connected to a modern broadband line, our internet is truly dire. 4G signal isn't amazing either, though we do get a bit. We're running out of patience with the pittance our providers offer for their pound of flesh.

Considering ditching our two crap copper landlines and going either 4G with an aerial or Starlink.

I'd heard the latter was next-level amazing but actually in our area they're only talking about speeds of 50-200: vastly better than what we have but it's not exactly Star Trek is it. Also been told by a neighbour that it stops working when it's raining hard, a thing to factor in if true.

On the other hand 4G is clearly yesterday's technology. Sure it won't be as fast and will likely have a greater latency.

Costs to setup and run seem broadly similar, though I imagine 4G would probably still work out a bit less.

We're erring towards the satellites. So I'd be interested to hear about people's experience of Starlink. Good, bad, so-so... Worth the money? About to take over the world?

Not direct experience...

A brother set Starlink up for one of his company's remote sites, in Eire, so it could send data back and forth to Cambridgeshire.

He reported set up as easy, and fun to watch as the gizmo homed in on the satellite, twitching its little head back and forth. All done in 15 minutes. Though he did tell me that he squabbled with the Starlink folks cos they initially refused to accept the GPS location of his site - apparently it has to be spot on for the gizmo to work - and would only accept the location of the nearest address from postal records. Or something like that. He prevailed in the end and link strength improved mightily once correct coordinates accepted.

When the link went live, he said they were getting consistent speeds higher than 100mbs.

I don't know what the set up cost; for his company money doesn't matter, only results.

If no one else has direct experience, I could ask him to message you? He's not on UKC.

j

What porn do you watch that requires >50mbs ? 8k ????

I'm in the French Alps and set up with Starlink about 6 months ago because fibre rollout had been delayed here. I regularly get 150-200mbps download which simply is more than I ever need (very connected house with about 25 devices on the wifi, plus myself and the wife work from home all day on back to back video calls).

Setup was simple - worth getting the ethernet adaptor and plugging into a mesh wifi system if you've got a big house to cover although the wifi/modem is decent but doesn't offer a lot of network options.

Being in the Alps we get some proper weather. So far it has worked extremely well during summer thunderstorms and winter snowstorms. There is a feature to heat the dish to melt snow which works quite well. I'd like to properly earth it to protect from lightning strikes but have so far ridden my luck.

Not sure if its the same where you are but most of the satellites we pick up are facing north which meant we have some potential obstructions since we're on the side of a mountain so don't have a low horizon in that direction but we only average a minute or so of obstruction every 12 hours. You can download the app and use the AR feature to detect if you will get line of sight. My reality of using the device is far better than what the app told me I would have.

Finally latency is great. It works really well for video conferencing and I hear its viable for gaming if that's your thing. I dabbled with Tooway satellite broadband about a decade ago and it was just expensive and slow to respond, and took half a day to set up and calibrate. 

It costs me 50€ per month for unlimited data which considering I was paying Orange half that for 4mbps ADSL I'm more than happy with. The biggest issue is the equipment costs which I think were about 600€ although I'm hoping there will be some resale value as I'd prefer to switch to fibre when we're finally connected.

4G is super cheap to try out... Have a look at the offers from 3. Think you get 30 days to try out for free. Contracts are generally £20 a month unlimited or less. When not busy I get roughly 75mbps down and 18mbps up with 50ms latency. When busy in an evening this can drop considerably, not usually a problem where I am can imagine this being a huge problem in an apartment block or heavily populated city though. If you get decent signal and can position the router with decent line of sight to the mast can imagine a sparsely populated area such as the Highlands would be a perfect application of 4G broadband. 

I have no direct experience but regularly have 1hr work Teams calls with someone who uses Starlink. On average they "freeze" 5-6 times per hour. They are in the wilds of County Durham, surrounded by hills and have some trees around. They are going to move antenna onto their roof to try and improve signal. Looks like you have to take care with the positioning of the antenna!

I use rural wi-fi. Is that an option? I tried using 4g but, like you, the signal from our nearest mast was patchy and, even with an external aerial, cut out in bad weather. I have a letter from Openreach saying they will not support broadband on our 1 mile copper/aluminium wire to a fibre cabinet.

Thanks all, some interesting stuff there to think over. It's not cut and dried.

Positioning the dish could be a bit of an issue with limited open ground, trees, hills and a hard-to-access roof. I'd need to give that some more thought before forking out for the hardware. 

4G on my phone gives me about 8mbps in the house, so not remotely great but believe it or not that's better than we get via the landlines. Guess an aerial would boost that. So almost anything would be an improvement.

Try the app first to get an idea. Mine said I had about 7% obstruction and would experience regular outages but I took the plunge anyway since the distance selling rules in France mean you can send it back no quibble if it didn't work, reckon you could do the same in the UK. 

FWIW in reality according to the app in the last 12 hours I've been without signal for 2m17s and 12s of obstruction. Must've been overnight because I didn't notice it. 

Minimum latency was 22ms and max was 66ms. Just done a speed test and up was 10mbps and down was 140mbps which is at the slower end of what I usually get. 

With 4G the router will be significantly more powerful than your phone so speed and reliability should get a boost. Also you can position the router in a way that will maximize signal strength.

It could also be worth potentially looking into external antenna, it isn't something that I have personally required however it is an option for boosting signal strength. https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/04/how-to-choose-an-external-4g-...

Thanks, the app's a good call

That's a useful article, cheers!

Dan, we use Starling in Glen Brittle and it's been awesome. Before we had really slow, intermittent or non existent internet which mad life awkward at times. I know it's not cheap but he ease of use and reliability is worth it (for us).

Just along the coast from you I think Dan, and we use Cromarty Firth Wireless. Getting around 40Mpbs down, and 20 up. A world of improvement over previous connections with BT!

Where we are has relatively poor 4G in the house. We fitted an external antenna (think it was about £130). Currently getting 28Mbps up and down via a 4G router, which is a vast improvement on the 'guaranteed 1Mbps’ provided by BT on copper wire.

I live in the Peak in a more rural spot beyond the reach of FTTP, have had Starlink for about a year now. Just done a speed test (image attached) which is about 10x faster than my previous ADSL connection. Speaking as a business user, it's the upload speed that really makes the difference.

Im also not far from dan and Cromarty firth wireless didn’t cover us. I was also put off when it seemed like they liked to do maintenance during the day(maybe it was a one off)

In the end I read up about what was causing our slowness , got rid of the extensions and a new master socket put in and now max out the line.

4g at my place (in the highlands and islands) is around 80mbps. I have a box and mesh network setup which sees anything up to 17 people all furiously smartphoning, smart tving and smart laptopping at the same time and I've not had anyone complain about speeds yet although I do imagine that at peak times it simply _must_ take a bit of a hit with that many people using it.

I also have a friend with a campervan with an aerial on it (talking small mushroom thing you can barely notice) and he gets fast 4g (enough to stream videos, etc.) in locations where I can't even get my normal mobile phone to connect at all, even to g or for an emergency call - just flat "no signal".

So what I would say is; if you already have some kind of mobile signal where you are, by the time you have augmented this with an aerial, you should have high-speed, reliable 4g that is more than sufficient for your needs.

Also, consider the cost. I just went to the starlink page and it says "£75 per month" so I guess that would be the absolute minimum contract possible (knowing how advertising works there could easily be hidden extra costs and/or a data cap), whereas my 4g sim with unlimited data is £30 per month which is a hell of a lot less.

I don't have experience with starlink but I'd be surprised if it makes sense to start using satellites in an area with mobile signal.

I do have experience with crappy landline connections though and honestly, I think that for remote rural areas, the future of connections is logically through the mobile phone masts, not through upgrading the landlines with optical laser superconductor future tech which makes sense in cities, but not for individual farm houses and hamlets of like 4 homes.

If you get fairly consistent 8mbps in the house then that's a lot better phone connection than I had surmised from your op. I would think with an aerial, you should be able to get the full 50-100mbps for your 4g. I think an aerial is only about £100 to £200 too, which is a fair bit cheaper than the hardware for starwars.

You originally said 50-200 mbps... do you really need anything in the upper end of that range? Might be worth installing some software to monitor your usage speed to find out what you really use... I'm sure plenty of sites on the internet throttle the speed at which you can get stuff at their end anyway, so at some point the increased speed at your end doesn't yield much extra benefit.

One thing to consider is the amount of traffic through the mast. I have seen 72 Mbps over my 4G, but it drops to around 20 during the day, and with a full caravan park near where the mast is situated that drops even more on a weekend.

There aren't. The subscription cost is all you pay.

That is better than I was getting in the house from the phone/mobile 4G router I had. Fitting a big sat dish style aerial from Mikrotik on the chimney and pointing it at the mast in Corris (14Km away) gives us 80/20 reliably (enough that I can work from home uploading Gb of data to Dropbox). Get the "Network cell info lite" app on your phone and wander about outside to see what sort of mast availability and signal strength you can get - it maps the location of masts and a bit of map head scratching will give you lines of sight etc. Only problem with ours is that we are reliant on a single mast, so a lightning strike or severe weather can put the system down other aerials offer wider receiver angles. Openreach are in the process of replacing copper with fibre  - they've reached the end of our track, but no idea when they will actually connect up to house with fibre to the property: https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/retiring-the-copper-network#:~:te....

Check if the Scottish Government have a 4G support funding package - the Welsh government covered the hardware costs for ours via the installer.

Best of luck!

It's only 50€ a month in France which compares very favourably with my previous 30€ per month 4mb ADSL from Orange). Originally they talked about a 250GB fair use cap (with decreased priority during peak times after that) but they scrapped it. 

There's also no yearly contract. You just pay month by month.