A few years ago the phrase “satellite internet” meant 600ms of latency, 250GB monthly caps and a dish the size of a barn door. It was a last resort for sites that fibre genuinely couldn’t reach.
Starlink has quietly rewritten that. We now use it routinely as a backup connection for business sites that previously had nothing to fail over to.
What changed: the latency reality
The big shift is altitude. Traditional satellite internet was geostationary — 36,000km up, with a round-trip light delay of roughly 600ms before any actual processing. That’s why VoIP and screen-shares were unusable.
Starlink runs at around 550km. Real-world latency to UK servers is typically 25–40ms — within the range of a domestic FTTC line, and comparable to a busy commercial leased line on a bad day.
Throughput sits at 100–300 Mbps down, 10–30 Mbps up, depending on contention and elevation. Plenty for most commercial backup scenarios.
Where it earns its place
We install Starlink as a primary link, but the more interesting commercial cases are backup roles:
- Failover for fibre or leased lines. When the BT engineer cuts the wrong cable two streets away, you don’t want to lose a day of trading. A Starlink dish on a dual-WAN router with policy-based failover keeps voice and key apps running.
- Construction and project sites. A site that’ll exist for 18 months doesn’t justify a 3-month wait for a leased line. Starlink ships next day and runs at 100Mbps from week one.
- Pop-up offices and events. Same logic. Throughput from day one, return the kit when you’re done.
- Rural workshops and homes. Where FTTC tops out at 12Mbps because the cabinet’s 4km away, Starlink is genuinely transformative.
- Resilience for secure sites. A site that cannot lose connectivity benefits from a completely independent path — different infrastructure, different physical layer, different points of failure.
What “install it properly” means
Most Starlink complaints we see come down to installation, not the service:
- Mount it where it can see the sky. Sounds obvious. Starlink wants a clear view to 30° above the horizon across most of the northern sky. A tree, a chimney stack or a neighbour’s loft conversion materially reduces throughput.
- Cable route, not cable drape. The kit ships with a long PoE cable, often routed across windowsills. We replace it with proper outdoor-rated cabling routed through a brick gland, terminated in a sealed junction, weatherproofed and labelled.
- Power and PoE in the right place. The router needs mains; the dish runs over PoE. We feed it from the same cabinet that’s running everything else, so a power blip on a desk doesn’t take the dish offline.
- Firewall integration. Starlink’s CGNAT means you can’t host services on it natively. For backup roles that’s fine; for primary links it changes how VPNs and remote access are designed. We plan around it.
- Failover that actually fails over. A dual-WAN setup is only useful if it cuts over before the user notices. We tune the routing thresholds so VoIP calls don’t drop on cutover, and we test it by physically pulling cables before handover.
A dish on a roof with the supplied cable run through a window does work. It’s just not a commercial install.
Cost vs leased line
Rough numbers for a UK business site:
| Option | Setup | Monthly | Speed (typical) | Resilience |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fibre leased line (1G) | £2,000–5,000 | £300–500 | 1 Gb symmetric | Single physical path |
| FTTP business (1G) | £200 | £40–70 | 900/100 Mb | Single ISP |
| Starlink Business | ~£2,500 | ~£75 | 100–300 Mb | Independent of terrestrial |
Starlink doesn’t replace a leased line for production traffic. It complements it. The cost of a Starlink backup is less than the cost of a single half-day of downtime at most commercial sites.
A practical pattern
The setup we install most often:
- Primary FTTP or leased line into a dual-WAN firewall.
- Starlink dish with proper mounting and cable routing into the same firewall on a separate WAN port.
- Policy-based routing: traffic class A always goes via the primary; traffic class B can use either; failover thresholds tuned so the cutover is under 5 seconds.
- Continuous health checking on both paths — if Starlink degrades, we know before the customer does.
It’s not exotic. It’s just network design with the satellite as a peer link, not a curiosity.
Whether it’s right for your site
Starlink isn’t the right answer for every business. If you’ve got resilient fibre from two carriers entering the building on diverse paths, you don’t need it. But for the majority of UK sites — single-fibre entry, no realistic alternative for miles — it’s the cheapest, fastest path to a real backup connection.
We’re happy to walk a site, look at the sky, and tell you whether Starlink earns its keep there. Book a free survey or see how we approach Starlink installations.
