Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service can be a useful business backup because it shares nothing physical with your wired circuits: no conduit, no street, no building entrance. Its latency is far lower than older geostationary satellite service and is usually workable for calls and cloud apps, but capacity is shared, the dish needs a clear view of the sky, and public static IPs are not always available. It is a strong choice where no genuinely diverse wired or wireless path exists, and usually the second choice where one does.
The appeal is easy to understand. Most outages that take a business offline for hours are physical: a cable cut in the street, a flooded manhole, damage in the building. A second wired circuit often runs through the same street, sometimes through the same conduit. A dish on the roof does not.
Geostationary vs low Earth orbit
"Satellite internet" used to mean one thing: a large dish pointed at a satellite parked above the equator. LEO systems work differently, and the difference is what makes them worth discussing for business at all.
| Geostationary (GEO) | Low Earth orbit (LEO) | |
|---|---|---|
| Altitude | About 35,786 km, fixed over one point | Up to about 2,000 km by definition; commercial broadband systems sit much lower than GEO |
| Round-trip latency | Commonly 600 ms or more, set by the distance | Typically tens of milliseconds, varying with load and routing |
| How the dish works | Points at one satellite that never moves in the sky | A flat panel steers electronically, handing off between satellites as they pass |
| Fit for voice and video | Poor; the delay is noticeable in conversation | Usually workable |
Radio signals travel at the speed of light, so a round trip to a satellite 35,786 km up and back takes a meaningful fraction of a second before any processing at all. A LEO satellite a few hundred kilometres up is roughly a hundredth of that distance away, which is why the latency drops so sharply.
What LEO does well as a backup
- Physical independence. Nothing in the street, the conduit or your building's telecom entrance is shared with your fiber. That is the property that matters most in a backup.
- Speed of deployment. A terminal can often be installed in days, with no construction and no carrier building access agreement.
- Reach. It works at sites no wired carrier serves well: rural branches, industrial yards, temporary sites.
- Portability. Some businesses keep a terminal ready to deploy wherever an outage or event needs it.
The limitations, stated plainly
It needs to see the sky
Because the satellites move, the dish needs a wide, unobstructed view of the sky, not just a line to one point. Trees, rooftop structures and neighbouring buildings cause brief interruptions as satellites pass behind them. In a dense city, where your roof may sit in the shadow of taller towers, this can be the deciding factor. Most providers offer a tool to check obstructions from the mounting spot before you commit.
Weather
Heavy rain and snow can reduce performance, and snow or ice on the dish can interrupt service. Some terminals can warm themselves to clear snow, which draws extra power. Treat storm performance as uncertain until you have seen it at your site.
Shared capacity and plan tiers
Satellite capacity over an area is shared among the terminals using it. Plans are commonly sold with data allowances or priority tiers, and speeds can slow at busy times or once priority data is used up. For a backup that sits idle most of the month this may not matter; for a backup that has to carry a whole office for two days, it does.
Public IP addresses
Many satellite plans place customers behind carrier-grade NAT. Outbound traffic, including browsing, cloud apps and most SD-WAN or VPN tunnels your equipment starts, works normally. Anything that needs to reach you from outside at a fixed address, such as a VPN server or an allow-listed vendor connection, may not. Check whether a public IP is offered on the plan you are considering.
Power and mounting
The terminal and its router need power, so a backup that dies when the building loses power is only half a backup. Put it on a UPS. You also need landlord permission to mount on the roof, a secure mount rated for wind, and a cable path down to your equipment room.
It is not independent of everything
Satellites relay traffic to ground stations that connect to the wider internet. A LEO backup is independent of your local plant, not of the internet as a whole. That is exactly what you want from a backup; just do not describe it as immune.
How satellite compares with other backup options
| Backup option | What it may share with a fiber primary | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Second fiber from another carrier | Street route, conduit, building entrance, unless diversity is verified | Best performance; true diversity may need construction |
| Coax | Often a separate entrance and network, but check | Small upload; sometimes shares the street |
| Fixed wireless | Building power; possibly the hub's fiber feed | Needs roof rights and line of sight to a hub |
| 5G fixed wireless access | Very little locally | Indoor signal and shared cell capacity |
| LEO satellite | Almost nothing locally | Sky view, weather, shared capacity, NAT |
The right order of preference for most offices: a verified diverse wired or fixed wireless path first, then 5G or satellite, depending on which one works better at your exact spot. The question of what "diverse" really means is covered in route diversity and redundancy, and the wireless options are compared in fiber vs fixed wireless vs 5G.
Making failover work
A backup circuit only helps if traffic moves to it on its own. An SD-WAN device or a dual-WAN firewall measures both links and shifts traffic when the primary fails or degrades. A few satellite-specific points:
- Tunnels: SD-WAN and site-to-site VPN tunnels initiated from your side usually work behind carrier-grade NAT. Tunnels that need to be reached from outside may not.
- Phones: hosted phone systems re-register over the backup and keep working, provided the upload and latency hold up. Test a real call on the satellite link. See our hosted phones page.
- Priorities: on a limited backup, tell the SD-WAN policy what matters. Voice, payments and the core business app first; software updates and cloud backups can wait for the primary.
- Data use: if the plan has a data allowance, stop large background jobs from running over the backup and using it up.
A worked example
Hypothetical figures, invented to show the reasoning. They are not quotes, provider prices or a real client.
A two-storey clinic has a fiber primary. Its coax option enters through the same conduit from the same street, and 5G signal indoors is weak. The clinic estimates an outage costs about $800 an hour in cancelled appointments and staff time, and it assumes one serious cable cut every couple of years lasting around eight hours.
On those invented numbers, one eight-hour outage costs about $6,400. If a satellite backup costs a hypothetical $150 a month, that is $1,800 a year, or $3,600 across the two years between expected outages. The backup pays for itself if the assumption holds, and it also covers the clinic during shorter outages it did not plan for. The clinic has a low roofline with open sky, so obstructions are not a problem. The same arithmetic in a Midtown office surrounded by towers could come out very differently once the obstruction check is done.
Checklist before you buy
- Run the provider's obstruction check from the exact mounting spot.
- Get written landlord permission for the roof mount and cable path.
- Put the terminal and router on a UPS, and check how long it runs.
- Confirm whether you need a public IP, and whether the plan offers one.
- Check the data allowance or priority tier against a two-day outage, not a normal month.
- Configure failover priorities so critical traffic goes first.
- Test a failover every month by unplugging the primary during a quiet hour. Our managed network service can run and report on those tests.
Questions to ask your provider
- What speeds and latency should I expect at my address at busy times, not in ideal conditions?
- Is there a data allowance or priority tier, and what happens when it runs out?
- Do I get a public IP address, or am I behind carrier-grade NAT?
- What is the power draw, including any snow-melt mode?
- Is there a business support line and a repair or replacement commitment for the terminal?
- Can I suspend or reduce the plan during months when it is purely standby?
Start with what your building already has
Before adding a dish, it is worth knowing whether your address has a genuinely diverse wired or wireless path, because that is usually the better backup. We check which carriers can reach your building and by which routes, have Tier 1 carriers bid, and tell you honestly if satellite is the better answer for your site. The carrier pays us, so there is no markup, and the review is free. Send us your address, call 478-758-8091 or text (347) 870-0965. For the wider picture, read does your business need backup internet.
