Airband vs starlink

[franki68]

Anyone had both ? I have starlink and it’s remarkable but I occasionally in very bad weather the service can be poor , but I have heard airband is more reliable in this respect .
I would like to hear of anyone’s experiences who has used both .

[OutInTheShed]

I think Airband do fibre, 4g and ADSL internet, so you need to be specific.
My friends with Starlink don't see any real problems in bad weather.

[franki68]

OutInTheShed said:

I think Airband do fibre, 4g and ADSL internet, so you need to be specific.
My friends with Starlink don't see any real problems in bad weather.

They describe the service they offer here as wireless .
Starlink works in bad weather just say it will drop from 250 mb download to say 70-80 not noticeable in many respects but it does occur .

[blueg33]

The problem with Starlink for me is fundamental. Its means giving my money to one of the biggest dheads on the planet. I am not going to do that.

Looking at Airband for our place in Devon where the BT wifi is 1.5mbps, and the 4g broadband we currently have is a bit hit and miss

[Lefty]

Starlink is literally our only option, no 4g, no fibre. Copper used to give us about 0.5mbps, about 4 miles from the exchange.

It works really well though, never had an outage, usually from 50-150mbps. fking expensive though, I’m on a 1tb priority package and it’s £175/month

[blueg33]

Lefty said:

Starlink is literally our only option, no 4g, no fibre. Copper used to give us about 0.5mbps, about 4 miles from the exchange.

It works really well though, never had an outage, usually from 50-150mbps. fking expensive though, I m on a 1tb priority package and it s £175/month

£175 per month - fk that

[Lefty]

There are options from £50/month - it depends on data usage

[franki68]

Lefty said:

Starlink is literally our only option, no 4g, no fibre. Copper used to give us about 0.5mbps, about 4 miles from the exchange.

It works really well though, never had an outage, usually from 50-150mbps. fking expensive though, I m on a 1tb priority package and it s £175/month

??? I’m on top domestic tariff and it’s £75 a month , and I get much better speeds than you get .how can you be on 1tb package but only get 50-150 mb ?

[Lefty]

There are options from £50/month - it depends on data usage

[biggiles]

OutInTheShed said:

I think Airband do fibre, 4g and ADSL internet, so you need to be specific.
My friends with Starlink don't see any real problems in bad weather.

I think Airband have very specific coverage with their specialised rural services: e.g. their website shows a huge area, but none of the postcodes I tried within it had coverage. What coverage do they claim for you?

Starlink is highly regarded, and (as mentioned above by Lefty) has high-reliability business plans (for which £175/mo isn't expensive IMHO), and cheaper domestic plans, depending upon your usage.

[P675]

I had 4g for 2 years with antenna in line of sight of the mast a mile away. That seemed to be affected by weather badly. Starlink I had for a year and no problems at all except 1 global outage. Weather would slow it down but you're still getting good enough speeds, doesn't make it unusable like I had with 4g sometimes.

Only got rid because luckily fibre is now installed in our area.

[geeks]

Lefty said:

There are options from £50/month - it depends on data usage

When we used it, was £75/month unlimited, never understood why anyone in a domestic setting would want the priority service offering

[Lefty]

There’s a fair usage policy, when network is busy you get bandwidth throttled right back which is a massive pain in the balls if you’re relying on it for work.

To protect against that you need a priority plan and then you set data limits (to which you can bolt on at great expense).

When you have no alternative, it’s brilliant and actually seems like good value compared to renting a small office somewhere for £1000+/month just to get a decent connection.

[OutInTheShed]

P675 said:

I had 4g for 2 years with antenna in line of sight of the mast a mile away. That seemed to be affected by weather badly. Starlink I had for a year and no problems at all except 1 global outage. Weather would slow it down but you're still getting good enough speeds, doesn't make it unusable like I had with 4g sometimes.

Only got rid because luckily fibre is now installed in our area.

4G around here is affected by weather, in that when the sun comes out, the bloody tourists turn up and use a lot of bandwidth.

I think Airband were offering plain old ADSL over copper at one point, a mate mentioned them but he's using 4G with a big shiny antenna.

I'm told that Starlink will work best with a decent view of the sky, but you can get a reduced speed if you have lots of tall trees around etc.

Personally we have some kind of fibre to the street cabinet, we generally score 20 to 30M on Fast.com and streaming video etc is solidly good these days.
We used to get slowdowns on wet summer days when all the tourists were in their caravans.

[theboss]

I had Airband fixed wireless for a while in Shropshire, between about 2012-2021

When it worked it was good (as in much better than the VDSL available), but I was never that happy with the service overall. It felt like I had a really reliable wireless bridge straight into the racks of a second rate service provider with poor support.

I ended up being an early Starlink adopter and at the time had Starlink, FWA and 2 x 4G external routers facing different cellular masts.

None of them were perfect but duplication of services ensured I could always remain online.

Then 4 years ago I moved to an area with a ducted path back to an exchange and got a leased line. FTTP has been enabled in the last few weeks.

I'd never go back from fibre but if I absolutely had to have one of the others as a backup I'd check Starlink out again as they have launched loads more satellites since I used them in 2021.

[silentbrown]

We had fixed wireless broadband from SWS in Shropshire abut 10 years ago, which I think is similar to the Airband stuff.

At the time it was an absolute life-saver, giving 20Mb/s download compared the the 2Mb/s that ADSL gave us. It used Ubiquiti radio gear for line-of-sight comms from a hilltop mast which served the whole valley.

I think they usually need a site survey to verify line-of-sight. If the receiver can't see the mast, you're stuck.

[AB]

I pay £75/month and the gear was free for Starlink, 12 month contract I think I had to sign up for to get that.

Didn't have a choice as we don't have fibre and lots of things rely on a decent internet connection these days.

I've had it in maybe a year and have not had a single drop out, that I have noticed, obviously. No annoying ring of buffer watching Netflix etc.

[Lefty]

Yep, never buffers, video calls don’t drop out, it just works.

[franki68]

Lefty said:

There are options from £50/month - it depends on data usage

I have unlimited data usage , all residential plans do the difference is the cheaper ones limit download speed .
I looked at their car site and it’s very unclear what you are getting over the top tier residential plan.

[Lefty]

The difference (as I found out) is that they throttle your download speed drastically once you go past their fair usage data in a month. I think that quantity of data depends on how many users there are in your area - there are loads of users around here because it’s literally the only option so I was regularly bumping into this flexible data limit which completely fked my ability to work.