Choosing Between Fiber and Starlink Internet for Preppers

One day last week, I heard a big diesel truck lumbering up the mountain, so I threw on my boots and went outside to take a look. It’s an old Dodge 3500 towing a large ditch witch on a trailer. That’s strange enough, but even stranger, they swing into our driveway. Turns out they are a third-party vendor working for our local internet provider and are here to run a fiber optic cable from the pole to my house.

I tell them the fiber from the pole to my house is fine; it was the fiber to the pole that was bad, and another crew came by a couple of months ago and strung new cable all the way up the mountain, ending at my pole. They want to replace it anyhow because they have a work order, and if they don’t do the work, they don’t get paid. I don’t want to stand in the way of two local boys getting paid, so I tell them to go ahead and install new fiber, but to use the conduit that is already in the ground instead of digging.

They can’t believe I have conduit. So, one guy and I stare intently at the cable on the house where it emerges from the ground while the other guy tugs on the other end. Sure enough, the cable on our end moves. They are delighted with this solution. They connect the new cable to the old and pull it through. In less than three minutes, we have brand new cable and it is buried, so they get paid. The ditch witch never had to leave the trailer. They treat me as if I am their new best friend.

Connecting the Fiber

On Friday, I hear another truck laboring up the hill, and it’s a bucket truck from the same cable company. They are here to connect the fiber. I turn on my modem and plug in the power for the “block,” which is what I call the box outside our house where the fiber optic gets converted to coaxial that runs into the house and reaches the modem.

They do the work quickly, but get no signal. Their diagnostic equipment says there is a connection 1700 feet away that they have to fix. They disappear back down the mountain and come back 20 minutes later saying it should work now. We go inside, and the modem shows nothing, so we reboot it, and various lights start blinking. A couple of minutes later, and we have a connection. I ran a speed test, and it showed 90 megabytes per second.

“Do you have 100 MB service?” he asked. No, we are paying for the 200. “Well, try it again.” I do, and this time it shows up as 198. (Which, by the way, I have never seen since; it’s always lower.) The installation is done! We are up and running. For the first time since Hurricane Helene blew through here more than ten months ago, our fiber optic internet connection is back up and running. I unplug the cable that connects Starlink from our wireless mesh router and run the cable to the modem instead. Within seconds, our wireless system is carrying the signal from our fiber.

What is our Best Option?

Now we have to decide which system to use —Starlink, or our local fiber provider.

Right out of the box, I will tell you that Starlink is $50 more per month. That’s a vote in favor of fiber.

Fiber also comes with a house phone. We plugged it back in, and darned if it doesn’t work. We had 14 voicemails, most of them from people checking on us right after the storm or from doctors and dentists calling to confirm appointments. Which goes to show you, we don’t use the house phone much. But hey, it’s free in our package, and we live out of reach of the cell towers.

The problem with the fiber is that when the power goes out—and we had 60 power outages for 550 hours in the past year—the fiber optic signal goes down. When there is a power outage and we are on fiber, the internet drops out and we have no phone connection, we can’t use Wi-Fi calling, there is no burglar or fire alarm connection, our security cameras go down, and we can’t watch TV (it’s all streaming) or use the internet. We can’t even send a text.

My best guess is that the fiber optic system requires power to run its switches at key points along the network, and when grid power goes down, the switches do, too. I can’t believe they don’t have any backup power, but that appears to be the case. I can only assume that we are just so far out in the boonies that it isn’t economical to install eight hours’ worth of backup batteries, which would cover 95 percent of our power outages.

Starlink Advantges

With Starlink, on the other hand, when the grid goes down, our solar power system powers the antenna and our routers. With less than 75 watts power consumption, we have full internet access and our cell phones work. We can call the police, report a fire, get an ambulance, or just watch TV or surf the Internet. We even get the emails from the power company that tell us when they expect power will be back on.

From a prepping standpoint, Starlink is the winning choice. And in the grand scheme of things, I think spending $600 annually—the cost of 1,000 rounds of 5.56 ammo—to be safer and better prepared is worth it.

Here is another issue: several friends in the area had their fiber optic repaired three or four months ago, so they dropped their Starlink plan. Then the fiber went out again. When they tried to sign back up for Starlink, they were told they could not because the area was overcrowded. I guess the three months of free service Starlink gave away after the storm filled them up to capacity.

Plus, when we watch live streaming shows, they can glitch with Starlink. Watching the NFL, for example, I usually get kicked out of the stream four or five times a game. My wife also experiences some buffering when she watches Netflix.

Our Solution

Right now, I turned off the Wi-Fi on my desktop computer and plugged the cable from the Starlink router right into my internet card. So I am getting all the Starlink bandwidth on my PC while everything else in the house—at least a dozen devices—is running over the fiber optic connection. But this is only a temporary solution.

I will purchase a router capable of doing load balancing and failover. We’ll plug the fiber optic in as our primary, and Starlink will become our secondary WAN. I will then program it to use both connections and balance them between the two. I can also keep my computer and my PC on a hardwired cable from the router so they are not part of the Wi-Fi network. This will give them a faster connection and make it impossible for someone who hacks our Wi-Fi to hack my PC. The router I am looking at costs only about $50.

Alternatively, I may set up the fiber optic as my primary and use Starlink as our failover network provider. In this case, we would use the fiber optic all the time, but should it go down, the router automatically starts directing traffic to the Starlink connection. This may allow us to change our Starlink to the residential lite program, which is only $50 a month. It would allow us to have both Starlink and fiber optic for the same cost as we are paying for Starlink right now. This may be the best solution, but it will take us a couple of months to try things out and make sure.

Off-Grid and Rural Internet

Let me be clear that we love Starlink and appreciate the company’s rapid response for hurricane victims. If we were off grid or had an RV, I would be delighted with Starlink. It was a lifesaver after Helene hit. Without Internet, we had no news and no communications. Getting Starlink up and running 17 days after Helene knocked us offline was an enormous boost to our morale and helped our lives return to normal. But we have never reached their promised download speeds, possibly because of our mountainous location.

The last reason we don’t want to shut down our Starlink account is that our local fiber optic provider has taken so long to get services back up and running. They either do not have the money or the staffing to make rapid repairs, and we don’t want to get knocked offline for months again. That’s a vulnerability you will not see with a major service provider in a more populated area. To put this in perspective, the local phone company is even worse; they are not laying new copper cable and have told their old telephone landline customers to get a cell phone or VoIP.

We wanted our fiber optic back on for multiple reasons, one of which is that is a selling point if we ever want to sell our house. With people working remotely, fiber optic gives them more bandwidth than Starlink. We are barely tapping its potential. If I needed two gigabit service, which is ten times faster than the service I have now, they could upgrade my account and turn it on in less than 30 minutes.

Information is Key

Information is a critical input during a crisis. Without good data, how do you make good decisions? HAM radios are great in an emergency, but they are a narrow funnel that will limit the information you can receive.

I kept my battery-powered lamps, Coleman lanterns, and candles after we installed solar power. I’m going to keep my Baofeng radios even though we have Starlink. For our safety and survival, I want to have redundant communication systems as well.