Starlink vs 5G home internet vs NBN: which one for your home?

People ring us to ask about leaving the NBN for 5G or Starlink, usually after weeks of dropouts, a granny flat with no connection, or a lease on a place with no cable in the wall. Sometimes it is the right call. Often the NBN line is fixable, and the faster choice is to have an independent NBN technician test your line first. Here is how the three compare for a home in Sydney, from someone who works on all of them.

Starlink vs 5G vs NBN: the short answer

For most Sydney homes, NBN on fibre to the premises (FTTP) or HFC is the best of the three: it is the fastest, the steadiest, and the only one that can carry NBN’s faster plans. 5G home internet is the smart move when you rent, when a granny flat or a new house has no NBN yet, or when your NBN is an old copper line and the 5G signal at your address is strong. Starlink makes sense where neither of the others works well, which in practice means acreage, rural and remote properties, and almost never a suburban street.

NBN, 5G home internet and Starlink side by side for a home

What matters	NBN	5G home internet	Starlink
How it reaches you	A cable in the ground or on a pole to your house	Radio from the nearest mobile tower to a modem inside	A dish outside talking to satellites overhead
What sets the speed	Your type of NBN connection and your plan	The signal where the modem sits and how busy the tower is	The dish's view of the sky, the weather and the plan
Getting started	A provider order, and sometimes an NBN visit	Plug in a modem, often the same day	Mount a dish and run a cable into the house
If you move	The connection stays with the house	A provider's plan is set up for one address	The dish can go with you; check the plan's terms first
Home phone and alarms	A phone through the modem, and alarms that are set up for it	Telstra says no home phone or alarms on its 5G home service	Ask your alarm company before relying on it
Best for	Almost every Sydney house and unit	Renters, granny flats, new homes waiting on NBN, backup	Acreage, rural and remote properties, caravans

Pick your situation

A Sydney house on fibre or HFC On a slow copper NBN line Renting, or a granny flat with no NBN Acreage or a rural property

NBN5GStarlink

A Sydney house on fibre or HFC

NBN

The cable in the ground wins. Fibre to the premises and HFC are the only connections that can take NBN's faster plans, and a cable is steadier than a radio signal. If it is slow, look inside the house first.

On a slow copper NBN line

Check the fibre upgrade, then 5G

First see whether your address can be upgraded to fibre. If it cannot, and the 5G signal is strong where the modem would sit, 5G can be quicker than a long copper line.

Renting, or a granny flat with no NBN

5G home internet

Nothing to dig and nothing to install. Check for a strong 5G signal where the modem will sit, and remember a provider's 5G plan is set up for one address.

Acreage or a rural property

Starlink

Where the cable never comes and the tower is too far away, a dish with a clear view of the sky is the dependable choice. Try it in place for a day before you drill.

When NBN fibre beats both

If your home has fibre to the premises or HFC, NBN beats 5G and Starlink for nearly every household. NBN says its higher speed plans are only available on those two connection types, and fibre runs on a cable all the way to the box on your wall, so it is not shared with a tower or affected by the weather the way a radio signal is.

NBN describes full fibre as delivering consistent speeds with minimal interruptions, and that matches what we see: when a fibre home has a problem, it is usually something in the house, not the signal. If you are on fibre and the internet is poor, the fix is almost never a different technology. It is the WiFi, the modem, a lead or the cabling.

If you are on one of the copper types, fibre to the node or fibre to the curb, check whether your address can be upgraded before you look elsewhere. NBN’s full fibre address checker (opens in a new tab) says whether your home is eligible. Since 1 July 2026, a fibre to the curb home no longer has to order a high speed plan to get the upgrade. What the fibre to the premises upgrade involves walks through the steps, and if the new NBN box ends up in the garage, our fibre upgrade cabling gets the internet to where you actually use it.

Before you leave the NBN, find out why it is bad

If you want to leave the NBN because it keeps dropping out, find out where the fault is first. A dropout caused by an old phone socket, a corroded joint or a tired lead stays fixed once it is fixed, and a working fibre or HFC line will outrun anything else in the street. Moving to 5G because of a fault you could have had repaired costs you speed for years.

Two quick checks tell you a lot:

• Test on a cable, not WiFi. Plug a laptop into the modem and run a test. If the cable is fast and the WiFi is slow, the NBN is fine and so is your plan.
• Look at the upload number as well as the download. A household on the cheapest plan with a slow upload can drop video calls even when nothing is broken. That is the plan, not a fault, and a phone hotspot is a quick fix for one call while you decide.

Check your speed first Test once on a cable at the modem and once on WiFi where it feels slow. If the cable result is poor too, the problem is the service, the line or the modem.

If the cable result is poor, why your NBN is slow sorts the usual causes, and a line that keeps failing needs testing on site to show whose side the fault is on. Sometimes the NBN side really is the problem and nothing moves for months. In that case 5G or Starlink is a sensible stopgap while you push your provider, not a reason to stop pushing.

When 5G home internet is the smart move

5G home internet is a modem with a SIM inside that connects to the mobile network, so there is no cable to the house and nothing for NBN to install. It is the right call in five situations we see over and over on the phone:

• You are renting. No holes, no cabling, and nothing to argue with a landlord about.
• A granny flat with no NBN. A granny flat on the same title often is not in NBN’s records, and getting it registered through the council can take weeks. 5G skips that.
• A new home waiting on a lead-in. If NBN needs a pipe dug from the house to the street, 5G can have you online the same day while that gets sorted.
• A backup for working from home. A 5G router by a window, with a cable run to the desk, keeps a home office going when the NBN is down.
• A slow copper line and a strong 5G signal. On a long fibre to the node line, a strong 5G signal can be quicker than the NBN. It will not beat fibre to the premises on the faster tiers.

How 5G home internet works

There are two ways to do it, and the difference matters if you rent. A provider’s 5G home internet plan comes with a modem set up for your address: Telstra says its modem is tied to the address where it was first set up, and Optus lets you take the service only to an address where it is available. The other way is a 5G router you buy yourself with a SIM or data plan in it. That one is yours, and it moves with you.

Either way, availability depends on the tower as well as the coverage. Telstra says whether you can get its 5G home service depends on 5G network capacity in your area, not just 5G mobile coverage, which is why one street can get it and the next cannot. Speeds move with the signal, how busy the tower is, the weather and how the home is set up. Check the data allowance too: a SIM plan with a small allowance gets expensive quickly in a household that streams.

How to test 5G at your address before you sign up

1. 1

   Stand where the modem will go

   Take your phone to the room, and ideally the window, where the modem would sit. Look at the top of the screen. If it says 5G with good bars, that is a promising start. If it only shows 4G, a 5G router will still work on 4G, just slower.

2. 2

   Use a phone on the same network

   5G coverage differs between networks, so test with a phone on the network you plan to use. A friend's phone on another network tells you about that network, not yours.

3. 3

   Run a speed test at that spot

   Run the test on the phone in the room, in the evening as well as during the day. That is close to what a modem in the same spot will get.

4. 4

   Check the provider's address check

   Put your address into the provider's 5G home internet checker. It looks at tower capacity, which your phone cannot tell you.

5. 5

   Start with a good router before an aerial

   If you are buying your own, pick a router that can take an external aerial later. Many get a good result from the window without one, and an aerial has to suit the network you are on.

For picking the router itself, our guide to choosing a 4G or 5G router covers the features that matter. And if the best signal is in the front room and the desk is out the back, a cable from the modem to the desk beats any WiFi trick: that is a small data cabling job.

If you would rather own the router and choose your own SIM, these two are 5G routers with a SIM slot. Check the address for 5G coverage on the network you pick before you buy.

We earn a small commission if you buy through our Amazon links, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Gear mentioned here, on Amazon Australia

Product	What it is for	Link
Mercusys MB520-5G	5G router, SIM slot, WiFi 6	View on Amazon for the Mercusys MB520-5G (opens in a new tab)
TP-Link Archer NX200	5G router, SIM slot, WiFi 6	View on Amazon for the TP-Link Archer NX200 (opens in a new tab)

When Starlink makes sense, and why it rarely does in suburban Sydney

Starlink is satellite internet: a dish outside, a clear view of the sky, and a router inside. On acreage, rural and remote properties it has been a big step up from the older satellite service, and for some of our rural callers it is the only connection that works well. In a suburban street that already has NBN or a decent 5G signal, it is usually the harder way to get the same thing.

Four things to know before you buy one for a home:

• Lag. The signal goes up to a satellite and back, so online gamers can notice the delay. For streaming, browsing and video calls, it is fine.
• The plan matters. Starlink’s own summary for its Residential Lite plan says its data is deprioritised and can be slower than the full Residential plan. Read the critical information summary for the plan you are looking at; it lists the speed range and what affects it, including the weather and the dish’s view of the sky.
• Try it before you drill. Set the dish up in a window or on a balcony for 24 hours. If it holds a connection through a full day, then mount it and run the cable in.
• Renting. If you pay for it yourself, buy the dish outright so it leaves with you. Starlink’s Residential Lite summary lists a one-month minimum term with no early termination fee.

Starlink is not built to be shared across a block of units, where everyone would split one dish and the lag would bother the gamers; a building’s long-term answer is fibre. If you do have Starlink and it starts buffering, check the simple things before anything else. Clean the dish, check nothing new is in its way, and test with a short new cable between the dish and the router, because a cable that has sat in the sun and rain for years can fail.

When it has passed the window test, the mount and the cable are what keep it running. On this new build in the Sutherland Shire we mounted a Starlink dish with its cable in conduit, then came back to fix a satellite dish, an RF antenna and a TV antenna to the roof ridges on two-part mounts, ran each cable up in conduit, and tested the signal on all four.

Watch: Starlink + Satellite + RF Antenna | Complete Rooftop Setup Sydney

Renting, a granny flat or a shed with no NBN: which one?

For a second building on the same block, there are four ways to get it online, and the simplest is often sharing the main house’s NBN. Here is how they line up:

1. Share the house’s NBN with a cable. A cable in a pipe from the house to the granny flat or shed shares the house’s plan, with nothing new to register, and the two households can split the bill. NBN for a granny flat sets out when your own service is worth chasing and when the cable is the better road.
2. Beam it across with a wireless bridge. Two small dishes, one on each building, when digging is not an option. Our guide to getting the internet to a shed or studio explains how they work.
3. Get 5G home internet. Your own service and your own bill, with nothing to dig, if the signal in the flat is good.
4. Get Starlink. Your own service where 5G is weak and digging is out of the question.

What none of them fix: the WiFi inside the house

Whichever way the internet arrives, it lands in one box in one room, and the WiFi from that box has to get through the house. Brick, concrete, steel framing and a metal roof can stop it whether the box is an NBN modem, a 5G router or a Starlink router. So if the internet is fine beside the box and poor in the back rooms, a new technology will not help. A cable to the rooms that matter, or a mesh system placed properly, will. That is a job for a WiFi technician, not a new provider.

When to call a technician, and when you don’t need one

You do not need us to choose between NBN, 5G and Starlink, to order a 5G plan, or to plug in a 5G modem. Those are yours to do, and your provider handles the plan and the modem. If your NBN keeps dropping out and the provider keeps telling you it is your wiring, that is when an NBN technician tests to the boundary and puts the result in writing, so you are deciding on facts.

Call us when there is a cable to run, from a 5G modem at the window to the desk or from the house to a granny flat; when the fibre upgrade has left the NBN box somewhere useless; or when the WiFi does not reach. If setting up the router or the phones is the hard part, that is home tech support. Ring 02 9188 1577 or send us a message.