Satellite: The Last Resort (and When It's the Only Resort)

Getting the Internet Right: Part 8 of 12

Satellite internet has one enormous advantage over every other connection type we've covered in this series: it works almost everywhere. If you can see the sky, you can get satellite internet. There's no cable to run, no fiber to build, no tower to have line of sight to. The provider's equipment is in orbit, and your dish points at it.

For businesses in truly remote locations, where none of the wired or fixed wireless options we've discussed are available, satellite may be the only option. And that's a legitimate use case that deserves an honest evaluation rather than a dismissal. But satellite also has fundamental limitations that make it a poor choice for anything involving real time communication, which means VoIP, unless you understand those limitations and plan around them.

How satellite internet works

Traditional satellite internet uses geostationary satellites orbiting about 22,000 miles above the Earth's equator. A dish on your building sends and receives signals to and from the satellite, which relays them to a ground station connected to the internet backbone. This is the technology used by providers like HughesNet and Viasat, and it's been available for years.

The newer approach, most prominently represented by Starlink, uses low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites positioned at altitudes of roughly 300 to 350 miles. Thousands of these smaller satellites work together in a constellation, with your data hopping between satellites and ground stations to reach the internet. This is a fundamentally different architecture than traditional geostationary satellite, and the distinction matters a lot for business use.

The latency problem with traditional satellite

The defining limitation of geostationary satellite internet is latency. Remember, these satellites are 22,000 miles up. Your data has to travel from your dish to the satellite (22,000 miles), from the satellite to a ground station (22,000 miles back down), and then the response has to make the same trip in reverse. That's roughly 88,000 miles round trip at the speed of light, which gives a theoretical speed-of-light minimum of about 480 milliseconds. In practice, with equipment processing and routing overhead, typical observed latency is around 600 milliseconds or more.

To put that in perspective, voice calls start to feel noticeably delayed at around 150 milliseconds of one way latency, and become genuinely difficult to conduct naturally above 250 to 300 milliseconds. Geostationary satellite internet imposes 600 or more milliseconds of latency before any other network delay is factored in. This makes traditional phone calls over geostationary satellite extremely frustrating. Both parties experience long, awkward pauses. People talk over each other constantly because neither person can tell when the other has stopped speaking. It's technically possible to make a VoIP call over geostationary satellite. It's just not a conversation anyone would describe as normal.

This latency is a hard physical limitation. No amount of technology improvement can reduce it because it's determined by the speed of light and the distance to the satellite. The satellite is where it is because it needs to be at that altitude to maintain a geostationary orbit. There's no engineering around this.

LEO satellite: the Starlink factor

Low Earth orbit satellite, particularly Starlink, has changed the conversation significantly. Because the satellites are orbiting at around 340 miles instead of 22,000 miles, the latency is dramatically lower. Typical latency on Starlink is in the range of 25 to 60 milliseconds, which is comparable to many wired connections and well within the acceptable range for VoIP.

Starlink also offers speeds that are respectable for business use, typically 50 to 250 Mbps download and 10 to 40 Mbps upload, though these numbers vary by location and time of day. The service has a business tier that offers higher priority and slightly better terms than the residential product.

On paper, these numbers sound quite good. And in practice, Starlink can work for VoIP, which is a statement that would have been absurd to make about satellite internet just a few years ago. But there are caveats that matter for business use.

The caveats with LEO satellite

Consistency. LEO satellite speeds and latency vary more than wired connections. The satellites are constantly moving across the sky, your terminal is switching between different satellites as they pass overhead, and the routing of your traffic through the constellation can change from moment to moment. This creates variability in performance that is noticeable compared to a fixed wired connection. On average, the performance is good. At any specific moment, it might be great or it might be mediocre.

For web browsing and general internet use, this variability is invisible. For VoIP, it can manifest as occasional moments of degraded quality, brief dropouts or audio artifacts that come and go without any clear pattern. A VoIP quality test run over several hours can show you the range of latency and jitter your satellite connection actually produces, which is more useful than a single speed test snapshot. Whether this is acceptable depends on your tolerance for imperfection and how critical call quality is to your business.

Weather sensitivity. Heavy rain, wet snow, and severe storms can degrade satellite signals. LEO satellite handles weather better than geostationary satellite due to the shorter signal path, but it's not immune. In areas with frequent severe weather, you may experience occasional service degradation during storms.

Data caps and prioritization. Some satellite plans have data caps or throttling thresholds, even on business plans. Once you exceed a certain amount of usage, your speeds may be reduced. Even plans marketed as "unlimited" may have priority tiers where heavy users get deprioritized during congestion. Read the terms carefully.

Congestion. As more customers sign up for LEO satellite service in a given area, the capacity per user can decrease. This is similar to the congestion issue with shared wired connections but harder to predict because it depends on subscriber density in your geographic cell, which can change over time as the service grows.

Obstructions. While LEO satellite is less sensitive to obstructions than geostationary (because it's connecting to satellites at various positions across the sky rather than one fixed point), it still needs a relatively clear view of the sky. Trees, tall buildings, and other obstructions can cause intermittent connectivity as satellites pass behind obstructed parts of the sky. The Starlink app includes a tool for checking obstructions at your installation location, and it's worth using before committing.

Satellite for VoIP: the honest assessment

Traditional geostationary satellite is functionally unusable for VoIP. The latency makes normal conversation impossible. If geostationary is your only option and you need phone service, you should look at a traditional phone line (POTS) if available, or a cellular based phone solution. Don't try to run VoIP over geostationary satellite and expect anyone to be happy with the result.

LEO satellite (Starlink) can support VoIP, and in many situations it works quite well. But it's not going to deliver the same consistency as a wired connection. If you're in a location where Starlink is your only internet option and you need to make phone calls, it's a viable choice. If you have wired options available and are considering Starlink as a primary connection specifically for voice, the wired options will give you better consistency.

Where Starlink works very well for VoIP is as a backup connection. Because it's completely independent of any ground based infrastructure, a satellite backup provides protection against the most common causes of wired outages: cut cables, utility pole damage, carrier equipment failure, and widespread local outages. We'll discuss this more in the Redundancy and Failover post.

When satellite is the right choice

Satellite earns its place for businesses in locations where the alternatives are truly limited. Rural areas without cable or fiber, locations too remote for fixed wireless, remote work sites, agricultural operations, and businesses in areas where the wired infrastructure is unreliable and unlikely to be upgraded.

For these situations, LEO satellite has been a genuine transformation. Businesses that previously had no viable internet option, or were stuck on barely functional DSL or a slow, high latency geostationary satellite connection, now have access to usable broadband. That's a big deal, and it's worth acknowledging even while being honest about the technology's limitations.

Satellite can also serve as a useful supplement in areas with only one wired provider. If the only other option is a single cable company with a spotty track record, adding Starlink as a secondary connection gives you diversity and a fallback that's independent of the local wired infrastructure.

What satellite is not

Satellite is not a replacement for fiber, DIA, or a good wired connection in areas where those options exist. The marketing around LEO satellite has been aggressive, and it's created an impression in some people's minds that satellite is now competitive with fiber for all use cases. It isn't. For raw speed, consistency, latency, and reliability, a good wired connection beats satellite every time. Satellite has gotten dramatically better, but it's still the option you choose when you can't get something better, or as a backup to something better.

That's not a criticism. Knowing what each technology does well and where it falls short is exactly the point of this series. Every connection type has its place, and satellite's place is clear: it's the connection that's available everywhere, and for the locations where it's the best available option, modern LEO satellite is good enough to run a business on. It just isn't the first choice when you have other options.

Next up: SLAs: The Contract Language That Actually Matters, understanding the promises your provider is making, and the ones they're not.