I 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.
(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".)
I 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.
It's probably because usually normal people don't but routers because they get them included in their internet subscription. So the people buying them have a specific reason to that normal routers don't do
It's a travel router which power users buy to get good connectivity away from home and office. An hotel won't offer you that (and chances are that they'll try to rip you off on their wifi).
Assuming you can find an Ethernet port to supply it, that is. Most hotels don't make them easy to find and use, if they even have them.
More common is that you use the travel router to connect to hotel WiFi and then share out that connection. It's slower than using directly, but it's great for family travel since you can name your travel SSID the same as your home network - all your usual devices will connect automatically, and will use any whole-connection VPN you have set up (most of the gl.inets will do Wireguard, OpenVPN, and Tailscale that I know of straight out of the box, and they will let you into luci or via SSH to configure the underlying OpenWRT directly for anything else). And, of course, it's just one device for hotels that try to limit the number of devices you use.
As far as travel and hotel goes, another huge benefit is that the router enables devices without captive portal support, on a recent trip I can use:
- Fi base station for my dogs trackers (huge for me)
- FireTV stick (no need to trust hotel streaming apps will clear your credentials like they claim)
Also I can WireGuard back home automatically for select IP ranges (no need to configure WireGuard separately on many of my devices)
Thank you for explaining this, I had always wondered how a carrier could tell a device was tethered if a router was not passing on tethered device details.
Another way to do it is to look for requests to domains that phones never access but desktops/laptops often do. Windows Update is the most common, but you could probably do apt package repositories or whatever.
I have a friend that is also curious. Their fibre cable was cut by addicts trying to find a source of copper that took a few days to be repaired. Using their hot spot during the outage used up their allotted hot spot bandwidth for the month. My friend would be very interested in how to avoid potential down time in the future.
Might I suggest an email address added to your HN profile, lest a publicly posted reply result in observation by a nefarious telecom employee who just might obviate the proposed solution to your friend’s conundrum.
I have AT&T Fiber and 99% of the time it's fantastic, but there are several instances of 30-60 second downtime a day and I have a 5G modem with a Google Fi data sim as a backup. Failover is nearly-instant with a Unifi UDM.
The data sim costs nothing extra on top of my cellular plan and just counts towards my (already very generous) monthly limit of 50GB.
Pulled the thread on this a bit and it seems that it will be highly carrier-dependent and will likely be flakey if it works at all.
TTL is one of the simplest methods carriers use to detect if there's an extra hop but very unlikely to be their only line of defense against methods like this.
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.
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.
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
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!
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 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.
I'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
A 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.
The 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.
I 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).
We'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.
I 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.
I 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.
Man, 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
> 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)?
I 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.
I 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.
Whatever 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.
Every 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.
And 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)
229 comments
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.
https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
More common is that you use the travel router to connect to hotel WiFi and then share out that connection. It's slower than using directly, but it's great for family travel since you can name your travel SSID the same as your home network - all your usual devices will connect automatically, and will use any whole-connection VPN you have set up (most of the gl.inets will do Wireguard, OpenVPN, and Tailscale that I know of straight out of the box, and they will let you into luci or via SSH to configure the underlying OpenWRT directly for anything else). And, of course, it's just one device for hotels that try to limit the number of devices you use.
Also I can WireGuard back home automatically for select IP ranges (no need to configure WireGuard separately on many of my devices)
> My carrier detects and throttles hotspot traffic by measuring packets TTL, so I tweaks the router's iptables to dodge that.
Could you elaborate on this?
Network packets commonly have start with default TTL values of 64, 128, or 255. Each hop in the network subtracts 1.
When phone connects direct to carrier (cell tower, I assume) the carrier will see TTL of 64.
A laptop tethered to a phone introduces a hop so laptop-to-phone TTL is 64, phone-to-carrier TTL is 63.
Carriers can then limit bandwidth if network packet that don't have a common TTL.
For
iptableslook at--ttl-inc 1(to add back the 1 so 63 => 64) or--ttl-set 64.Alternatively, you set the tethered devices to use a TTL of 65, e.g. linux/mac
sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=65/ip firewall mangle add chain=postrouting out-interface=lte1 action=change-ttl new-ttl=set:64 passthrough=yes comment="Set TTL for Mobile Hotspot"
Default TTL is usually 64.
Phone traffic TTL is 64.
But when behind the phone-as-router/gateway, compy traffic TTL is...63!
The data sim costs nothing extra on top of my cellular plan and just counts towards my (already very generous) monthly limit of 50GB.
Pulled the thread on this a bit and it seems that it will be highly carrier-dependent and will likely be flakey if it works at all.
TTL is one of the simplest methods carriers use to detect if there's an extra hop but very unlikely to be their only line of defense against methods like this.
$5/mo for pretty guaranteed connectivity, plus being able to take it around with me on travels is pretty awesome.
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).
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.
Getting my own modem and router easily paid for themselves, plus I'm not arbitrarily locked out of anything.
Also, is this available globally or UK-only? I can't find any mention of it on the local Starlink site.
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...
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
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.
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).
Depending on your area you don't even need an external one. A simple 4g dongle would do.
> 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)?
Reminds me of the good old days of the internet.
I also migrated to Starlink recently and quite like the service so far.
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.