April 18, 2024
It can be easy to get lost amongst the headlines, constant solicitations from vendors, and friends and family talking about how much technology is changing the world— bitcoin this, electrical vehicle that, AI oh my— the list goes on.
Another popular topic in the telecom and IT space is Starlink internet, and as the leader of a company who nationally delivers wireless connectivity to construction clients, I constantly implore my team to be the ‘trusted advisor’ and help our clients cut through the noise. Today I share some thoughts on what Starlink is, how its business internet offering is a solid option for construction teams, and why its best delivered via an authorized solution provider like Metro Wireless.
Forgive our shameless plug, check out our Managed Business Starlink offering here: https://www.metrowireless.com/starlink
Starlink internet is lower earth orbit (LEO) based internet access, delivered to residential and commercial users. While Musk’s company wasn’t the first to deliver internet via satellite, his is the first to reach critical mass and wide market adoption. Further, Starlink now offers different tiers of service for residential and commercial needs. Their residential offering is the cheaper alternative, carrying lower traffic priority (aka slow lane on the highway) with worse reliability than the commercial offering. Commercial users with the High-Performance Dish and accompanying monthly service benefit from higher network priority and better reliability. Expect to pay $2,500 for the dish kit and ~$600 per month for the service.
The construction industry is always in need of better ways to connect their teams to the internet, whether that is for their internal network use, cloud-based applications, or to communicate with other parties. While LTE- and 5G-based wireless internet has been the go-to for many teams, it can lead to a flawed deployment in rural areas where cell towers are too far away or where too many users are congesting the nearest tower. Hence, Commercial Starlink's business internet provides a new path for delivering high-speed, fast to deploy, and reliable connectivity.
Similarly to LTE- and 5G-based wireless internet connectivity, Starlink allows for ultra-fast deployments as the only hardware involved is a rooftop dish and the included router. Firms can elect for professional installation, or have their teams self-install, usually executed in 30 minutes or less. Traditional wireline options like fiber, coax, and DSL would never allow for overnight deployments. Wireless also allows for fast decoms and cancellations when the job is completed.
For firms demanding the fastest connections at the jobsite, multiple Starlink satellite dishes can be deployed with their connections bonded together to increase total download and upload speed throughput; we’ve seen up to 750x80. This is managed by an SD-WAN router your authorized solution provider configures and deploys, and can be aggregated with other types of connections like coax, fiber, DSL, etc.
No single internet connection is bulletproof. Things happen, and especially with Starlink, there can still be outages from time to time. Ask your service provider about how they can pair a Managed Starlink solution with an LTE/5G failover connection, so that your jobsite doesn’t go down when Starlink has a momentary outage. It’s feasible to deliver highly available, 99.99% uptime environments in the field without relying on expensive DIA fiber connections.
While commercial clients who purchase directly from Starlink only get access to limited email- and chat-based support, Starlink has opened a direct tier-2 support channel to authorized providers, who then provide their own 24/7/365 NOC support to clients, relieving IT team frustration when issues arise. Further, Starlink can’t offer static public IPs, but authorized partners offer blocks of IP addresses delivered via their managed router along with WiFi.
While we did wait for Starlink to become fully baked, we’re finally ready to recommend it to our business clients. We still believe the satellite-based internet solution is best delivered via an authorized solution provider like Metro Wireless who can offer the value-add of bonding multiple connections for faster speeds and LTE/5G failover, not to mention their dedicated NOC support and public IPs. We’re excited about this new means of delivering better commercial connectivity. Though like anything else, it’s not about the solution, but rather how you deliver for your customers.
