Dongle or Personal Hotspot

Thanks Briste. I call the device a dongle for want of a better name but it doesn’t pllug into a usb port. It’s a wireless device that I usually leave powered up in the car. Given to us by Telstra when we moved into our new home and used it till they sorted out our nbn issues.
If there are no major issues as indicated by David and Michelle, might continue with the hot spot arrangement and buy more wine rather than pay to add the dongle to our Telstra account.

OK, so you have a battery-powered wireless broadband modem. If it's not a Netgear Nighthawk like mine then it would be broadly similar. If I didn't have it then I'm not sure I'd buy it now. Nowadays you can use eSIMs to have two carriers on the one device, or I could just put the second SIM in the tablet. I'd hotspot from one or other device depending on which carrier is available.

I bought the Nighthawk when I was intending the follow the approach of a vlogger named Overland Exposure, who was advocating the use of a Nighthawk with a directional MIMO antenna as a way to get reception in very marginal areas. But the price of Starlink hardware dropped before I bought the antenna. So the Nighthawk is not much used, really only when I'm away for a sufficiently short period that it's not worth unpausing the SL account, and there's a decent Telstra signal but no Optus. Or at home during an Optus meltdown.

In theory one advantage of the Nighthawk is the option to use a better (MIMO) antenna, but I've never really been in a recent situation where I wanted to do that. I got the SL dish for remote travel.

Briste...he has a battery powered mobile phone that wirelessly connects to a tablet mounted on his dash...No wireless broadband modem..