It took me over 7 hours to drive home after visiting my son and his family. We had 3 major delays. Once it took nearly an hour to drive 5 miles. When we got to the front of the traffic delay a pickup with a U-Haul trailer was sitting in the right lane. To make it worse he was about 100 yards from the end of the construction barriers. 6 stout lads could probably have pushed him the rest of the way and got him onto the shoulder but noooo. Everyone only thought of themselves and the line of car in the left lane trying to make up for the lost time. Jerks.

So anyway, I get home and my brother sends me a video of his neighbor. A tree limb blew down and landed on a power line knocking out electricity to 3 houses!!! Not his. Can you imagine the horror of it all? 3 houses that have to wait from Saturday night until Sunday afternoon for the electric company to string a new line.

He started to talk about hooking either his house/office or MINE up to Starlink. Just in case, mind you a tree limb knocks out power. He was working hard after the storm came through submitting loss notices to our various insurance carriers.

I pointed out:
1. A few weeks ago he was banging the drum for fiber optics.
2. With our two office locations (in separate towns) also my home, and our office manager all having internet service, the odds of none of these locations being able to have access to the internet is almost zero.
3. In order to be necessary we would need to be without internet for several days not a few hours.
4. Starlink is sorta expensive for what you get. Especially compared to regular cable service. And it would be slower which he mentioned.
5. In 40 years this has never been a need. So why worry now? Granted anything can happen tomorrow.
6. I am not sure of the transition speed of Starlink but if it is slower and more expensive we would have worse service for years, just in case "something" happens.
7. But if it does then the lack of internet service will be the least of our worries because we won't have the ELECTRICITY to run the Starlink server.

He didn't reply back. I guess it's no fun to be told you're wrong in an itemized list. (I didn't number them for him.) I didn't even capitalize a few of the key points.

There are so many other things to worry about. It always amazes me when people (not just him.) get hung up on stuff I think are non issues.

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If it's internet service just for you or workers, hot spots suffice just fine. And if you're with someone like Cricket Wireless, you can add the hot spot ad-hoc without subscription and pay just for one month to get by. I had to do this very thing couple months ago.

Starlink feels as good as Dish Network or DirecTV. If it's stormy out, I suspect signal quality to suffer. I haven't looked into it though so I haven't a clue.

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As to the road blockage situation, something instantly came to mind...
My boys made me quite pleased and proud.
I should say our boys, but you know what I mean.

Please Google the following:

"Marines push car out of flood"

Semper fi, Marines!

Good that the Marines finally did something!!! 🤣🤣😜

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Point #7 is the first thing I thought of. For this to work you would need a generator or something like solar and batteries. You can get some pretty good portable battery backups these days that would keep a modem/router and a single computer (PC, laptop) or a few mobile devices up and running for a while.

Another option is a pocket wifi router with a sim card, I've used this in the past to connect a few devices when the internet was down for a few days. Also handy for traveling internationally. Maybe this is what Kevin is talking about when he said hotspot. I haven't used mine in a while because my phone has a hotspot function on it.

PS: Fiber is awesome, get it if you can! I have 1 gbps down and up (1000/1000 mbps) for about the same cost as 300/30 from the cable company.

Looks like Starlink is 25-100/5-10 or 40-220/8-25, depending on the plan you pay for. I'm not sure why the wide range, but possibly due to location and/or conditions (clouds etc). I think it makes sense if you're rural and can't get broadband, but otherwise probably not.

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