alt Hacker NewsUsing a 4g/5g router is much easier and probably cheaper/power efficient.
Depending on your area you don't even need an external one. A simple 4g dongle would do.
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There are probably cheaper options, especially if you want to literally use your smartphone as the hotspot, but the Verizon home backup internet plan I looked at recently is $20 a month (and gives you 7 24-hour periods per month of unlimited data).
The Verizon home router is included when you sign up (you have to return it if you cancel). I bought it out of desperation when my home fiber internet was down all weekend due to a local tech screwing up and unplugging my house from the breakout box on the curb, but given the cost and the normal reliability of my home internet it’s really barely worth it.
Unifi (which the OP uses) even has dedicated devices for this type of failover: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/29887153953559-UniFi-5...
When here is local power outage and everyone switches to 4g/5g, it is overwhelmed and unusable.
Yup, OP is from the UK. In the UK I got a ThreeUK business SIM for £49 that lasted 2 years with 500GB data. It sits in wan failover and manages about 50mbps which is perfect to keep most services running.
That works right up until the cell tower goes down too. Then the dongle is a fancy USB decoration, and Starlink Mini, clunky as it is, still has one big advantage: your backup path isn't sharing the same failure mode, which is the whole point even if the setup are uglier and the power draw is worse.