u/Ok-Assistance-9837

After some advice on here the other day, I took the plunge and ordered a Starlink Mini for use at events with poor phone signal.

The dish arrived yesterday and I plugged it in for some quick testing in the garden. Speeds were showing around 200mbps down in the Starlink app - amazing and way more than I'll need for my usage. However when I run a speed test on my phone connected directly to the built-in router, I only get 50mbps. That's still plenty and I understand that's rela world, not just testing the speed to Starlink, but now I'm curious why it's so much lower - what speeds do the built-in router support? I also notice that my phone is connected via 2.4ghz, rather than 5ghz. Does the mini not support 5ghz wifi?

The connection link speed shows as 156mbps max between my phone and the Starlink, despite being right next to it in the garden - is this really the limit?

It's a Pixel 9, which supports a lot faster link speeds, so the limitation is not my phone.

I run a small business and am currently experimenting with pop-up stands at shows/events. Many of these are outdoor and can be semi-rural, where the phone signal is poor and then once everyone arrives at the event the networks get overloaded. This causes a lot of trouble for taking card payments.

I've thought about Starlink and the mini dish, my use would purely be for card payments via my POS tablet. I've only booked a couple of events this year and not sure how frequent they'll be, so of course Starlink is quite an investment for a very limited use case. It seems the cheapest plan is the £30/m business option for 50GB. However is it true that the business plans also do not allow standby mode?

I need so little data that a 10GB/m plan would be plenty, I don't even need high speed access, just the bare minimum for card processing. Signing up for £30/m is a lot for my use. It's also not clear if this includes VAT, which being a 'business' plan, I would guess £30/m is ex VAT?

What other options are there? I've got a traditional 5G mobile hotspot and at the last event it was useless, as soon as visitors arrived, the networks all got flooded and card payments became almost unusable, it would take 3-4 mins to connect and then often fail and have to start again :(

I also have a dual sim phone, on 2 networks and both suffered the same issues on the day.