A backup connection is one of those things that nobody thinks about until the day it earns its keep. When the primary line goes down, the question is rarely whether a backup exists. It is whether the backup that was chosen actually suits the site it is protecting.
5G and Starlink are both perfectly good failover options, and we supply plenty of both. They do, however, suit very different locations, and choosing the wrong one tends to only become obvious at the worst possible moment. In this blog we will go through where each of them performs well, and how to work out which one belongs at your site.
What a failover connection has to do
Before comparing the two, it is worth being clear about what the backup is actually for. In most cases it is not there to replicate the primary line in full. It is there to keep the things that matter running, which usually means card payments, voice, and access to whichever cloud systems the business depends on to trade.
That distinction matters, because a connection that would be frustrating as a full time primary can be entirely adequate as a backup. It also means the questions worth asking are about coverage and consistency at that specific location, rather than headline speeds.
When 5G is the right choice
For sites in urban and suburban areas with decent mobile coverage, 5G is usually the straightforward answer. Latency is low, which matters a great deal for voice calls and card terminals, and the equipment is compact enough to sit in a comms cabinet without any additional work.
Deployment is also simple. A router with a multi-network SIM can be posted out pre-configured and brought online in minutes, with no installation visit and nothing mounted to the outside of the building. Where the site is leased, or where the landlord takes a dim view of fixings and cable runs, that alone often decides it.
The one thing to check honestly is coverage at the property itself rather than in the postcode generally. Thick walls, basements and the middle of large retail units can all be considerably worse than a coverage map suggests, which is why we would normally look at a signal survey before committing.
When Starlink is the right choice
Once a site sits far enough out that mobile coverage becomes patchy, the calculation changes. Starlink does not care how far the nearest mast or telephone exchange happens to be, and that makes it well suited to rural sites, construction and temporary locations, agricultural settings and anywhere fixed line simply is not going to arrive at a sensible price.
It also tends to be the better answer where the backup needs to carry real volume rather than just keep the tills running. Sites pulling down large files, running multiple CCTV streams or supporting a full office of staff will usually find the available bandwidth more comfortable than a congested mobile cell.
The trade offs are that it needs a clear view of the sky, somewhere sensible to mount the dish, and a little more thought at installation than posting out a router. On a permanent building that is a one off job. On a site that moves every few months it is worth planning for properly.
Running both
A good number of our customers do not choose between the two at all. They run 5G as the everyday backup, because it is cheap to keep sitting there and it takes over instantly, and they keep Starlink for genuine off grid resilience or for sites where the mobile signal cannot be relied upon.
Where an SD-WAN device is doing the steering, both connections can be live at the same time rather than one sitting idle waiting for a failure. Traffic then moves across whichever path is healthiest at that moment, and the failure of any single link stops being an event that anybody at the site has to notice.
How to decide
In practice the decision usually comes down to three questions. What is the real mobile coverage inside the building, not outside it. How much traffic does the backup genuinely need to carry if the primary line is out for a full working day. And how permanent is the site, since that governs how much installation work is reasonable.
If you would like help working through those questions for a particular location, contact us below with the details and a member of our team will be happy to talk it through with you.
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