Starlink at a work site solves one problem well and should almost never be your only link

The short version

• Where there is no wired option, it is usually the best available answer by a wide margin.
• It needs a genuinely clear view of the sky. Obstructions matter more than most people expect.
• Weather affects it. Heavy snow and heavy rain both degrade the link.
• Latency is far better than older satellite service and still worse than fiber.
• The best use in a business is often as the second link, not the only one.

Where it earns its place

Three situations where I would recommend it without hesitation.

No wired option at all. A farm, an outbuilding, a yard, a gravel pit. When the alternative is a DSL line that manages a few megabits on a good day, this is not a close call.

A temporary site. A job trailer on a construction site, a seasonal operation, a site that will exist for eight months. Trenching or a business line install makes no sense for something temporary, and a dish on a pole does.

A second link for failover. This is the use I would push hardest, and it applies to businesses that already have decent internet. More on it below.

What actually goes wrong

Obstructions. The dish needs clear sky in the direction it looks, and the satellites move, so it needs a clear cone rather than a clear line. A tree that is fine in February is a problem in June when it leafs out. A tree that is fine this year is a problem in four years.

This is the single most common cause of a disappointing install, and it is also the most preventable. Starlink’s own app has an obstruction check that uses the phone camera to map the sky from the proposed mounting spot. Use it, from the actual position, before committing to a location. Then think about what grows there.

Weather. Snow accumulating on the dish blocks it. The units have a heater that handles ordinary snowfall, and a heavy wet dump can still beat it. Heavy rain degrades the signal for the duration. In a Durham winter, expect occasional interruptions.

Mounting. The included stand is designed to sit on the ground and prove the service works. It is not a permanent installation. A permanent mount means roof or pole, properly flashed if it penetrates a roof, and grounded. That last part is not optional on a metal building or an exposed rural pole.

Upload speed. Download figures get quoted. Upload is much lower and is what matters if you are pushing camera footage offsite, running cloud backups, or hosting video calls where you are the one being seen.

Latency. Much better than the geostationary satellite services people remember, because the satellites are far closer. Still higher than fiber or cable, and variable as the connection hands off between satellites. Fine for video calls and normal work. Noticeable in anything genuinely latency-sensitive.

Static IP addresses and inbound connections. Consumer-tier service uses carrier-grade NAT, which means you cannot simply forward a port to reach something on your network from outside. This catches people who expected to view their cameras remotely the way they would on a business cable connection. There are business service tiers and there are workarounds, and both need deciding before the cameras go in rather than after.

The failover argument

Here is the use case I think is undersold.

A business in Bowmanville with a cable connection loses internet for six hours because a contractor cut a line three streets away. Nothing is wrong with their equipment. They cannot take card payments, reach their cloud software, or send an email.

Starlink as a second link fixes that, and it fixes it in a way a second wired connection often cannot. Two wired providers in the same area frequently share physical infrastructure somewhere upstream, so the same backhoe takes out both. Satellite has no physical path in common with anything.

Setting this up means a router or firewall that supports two connections and fails over automatically. If it needs someone to unplug one cable and plug in another, it will not happen at the moment it matters, because the person who knows how is on a job in Pickering.

For a site that loses real money during an outage, this is one of the better value purchases available. It costs a monthly subscription and a bit of configuration.

Starlink or a wireless bridge

For two buildings on the same property, these get compared and they should not be, because they do different jobs.

A wireless bridge links your buildings to each other. Traffic stays on your own network, throughput is high, latency is very low, and there is no monthly fee. What it does not do is provide internet. It extends the connection you already have.

Starlink provides internet at a location. It does not put that location on your network.

So a shop 200 metres from the main building, needing access to the same files and the same cameras, wants a bridge. An outbuilding with no connection to anything, needing internet on its own, wants Starlink. A site needing both wants both, which is a common and sensible answer.

What this means for your building

For a farm operation near Port Perry, this is usually the primary connection and the honest advice is about mounting and obstructions, because those decide whether it performs for a decade or annoys you every spring.

For a steel building on a rural lot, pair the conversation with cellular coverage, because a site with no internet usually has poor mobile signal too, and Wi-Fi calling over a new Starlink link often solves the phone problem as a side effect.

For a job trailer, the practical issues are power and physical security. The dish needs to be somewhere it will not be stolen or reversed into.

For an established business in town with good internet, the interesting conversation is failover, not replacement.

What to do about it

1. Run the obstruction check from the actual mounting position, using the app, before buying anything. Look up and think about what will be taller in five years.
2. Decide whether this is the only link or the second link. That decision changes the router requirements and the service tier.
3. Plan a permanent mount from the start. The ground stand is for testing. Roof penetrations need flashing, poles need grounding.
4. Check your upload requirement, particularly if cameras or backups will push data offsite.
5. If anything needs to be reachable from outside, sort the addressing question before installing the equipment that depends on it.
6. If it is a failover link, test the failover. Unplug the primary connection deliberately, during business hours, and watch what happens. Then fix what did not.

Starlink installation with mounting, grounding and network integration is one of the things we do, usually as part of a wider connectivity plan rather than on its own.