Starlink: Does it have a role in the enterprise WAN?

At Coevolve, we take the telco-independent concept very seriously - we have built our SD-WAN, SASE and multi-cloud networking solutions to be truly 'over the top', without any dependence on any underlying provider. As of last month, our clients were using over 480 telcos and ISPs in the solutions we manage for them, so there is a wide variety of underlay infrastructure out there that we keep a very close eye on.

At the same time, we work with many clients that operate in markets that are pushing the boundaries of traditional, terrestrial infrastructure. Manufacturing, natural resources, engineering and construction - we have experience in all of these industry verticals and they do not generally have locations in traditionally "easy" geographies. This can often result in requirements to use fixed wireless infrastructure, as well as VSAT satellite solutions.

The problem with satellite infrastructure in enterprise WANs

Anyone who has used traditional satellite solutions as part of a WAN architecture is familiar with the challenges they pose, and why they are usually considered the connection of last resort. Some of the many challenges we've seen clients experience include:

• Extremely high latency, with round-trip times to the first hop usually ranging from around 800ms to well over a second
• Very high cost, often coupled with per-kilobyte billing models
• Expensive equipment and terminal installation process

Traditional satellite service providers have used a variety of WAN optimization and caching techniques over the years to improve performance, but these measures are at odds with an industry-wide move towards encrypted content and more real-time media traffic. Using a VSAT service as an underlay path on an SD-WAN solution, where the traffic is carried over encrypted tunnels can be a painful experience and many applications just cannot operate with the extremely high latency.

How is Starlink different?

The launch of SpaceX's Starlink service generated a lot of buzz in the industry, as it claimed to address all three of the major challenges outlined above. The single biggest difference between Starlink and traditional satellite offerings is the vastly lower orbit, which has a material impact on latency:

This point is often missed, as people assume that as Starlink is also a satellite service it must be subject to the same laws of physics as traditional satellites, and have a high latency as a result. The physics is the same, but the orbital altitude couldn't be more different. This allows the satellite portion of the traffic flow to be significantly reduced, facilitating round trip times to the first IP hop of 20-40ms in many cases. In fact, in the Starlink network your proximity to the nearest ground station can often have the biggest impact, as this is where the connectivity to the Internet occurs. Here are two examples, showing the ground stations in the US and Australia (red dots), and the associated coverage areas (in green hexagons):

Images from https://satellitemap.space/

At Coevolve we immediately signed up for the beta release of the Starlink service when it was launched, as we felt it could be very relevant for our clients operating in remote areas where traditional infrastructure just isn't good enough. We've used the service extensively since then to understand how it performs, and to see if it really could be used in these scenarios.

So, is it good enough?

There are really two answers to this question. The short answer is "probably, yes". The longer answer is that the real value of a service like this becomes apparent when it's part of a pool of connectivity, which is what we would advise enterprises to adopt whenever possible.

First, let's look at the latency. Starlink really does live up to expectations here, consistently providing round-trip times that are somewhere between a fiber-based broadband service and 4G data connectivity. This is from one of our test sites in Sydney, Australia connecting to several SD-WAN gateways:

With these latency numbers, it's perfectly feasible to have real-time voice or video calls using the service, something that just wasn't realistic with traditional satellite services.

The stability of the service, in terms of packet loss and short outages is a little more problematic. We regularly saw periods in our testing where the packet loss levels would jump up significantly, in many cases resulting in a complete outage of the service for several seconds. From the research we have done we believe this is related to some of the handovers between satellites - it doesn't always result in an outage like this, but it appears to happen in some cases:

If the service was being used on its own, this could be quite disruptive to real-time traffic flows in particular as the outage would be very apparent.

However, it's clear that Starlink can have a big improvement on the overall user experience at a location, especially if the other circuits are problematic. This post by CEO Tim Sullivan highlights some of his recent experience during a period of very poor performance on his primary broadband service - the Starlink path made a huge difference:

Conclusion

Overall I think this service has huge potential in enterprise networks. I've worked with so many enterprises that operate in environments where they cannot get any fixed-line infrastructure, and often have to scrape by with 3G and 4G data connectivity. For locations like this, Starlink promises to be a game changer. Even the ability to quickly connect a very remote site without a professional installer is an interesting prospect, and I can see many enterprises benefiting from this to a huge extent.

I'm excited to see more development in this space - we've seen a lot of progress already in a very short period of time, and there are several other businesses that promise to offer a similar capability in the coming years. I'm looking forward to sharing some great examples in the near future of how our clients at Coevolve are benefiting from this technology.

If this is something you're interested in exploring for your business, please get in touch today and I'd be happy to help!