Partners Get Hands on Starlink, Low Earth Orbit Satellites
Eutelsat OneWeb and Amazon Kuiper have followed SpaceX Starlink into space. But how can partners monetize internet services from low Earth orbit satellite internet?
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IRINA SHI/Shutterstock
The low Earth orbit (LEO) providers differ from other satellite internet providers by a matter of thousands and thousands of miles, and that difference is key.
The United States Space Force defines low Earth orbit as the space up to 1,200 miles above the planet's surface. That includes not just thousands of Starlink satellites, but also the International Space Station (250 miles) and the Hubble Telescope (320 miles).
Starlink says its satellites average an altitude of 340 miles. And while that seems quite far away, it's actually only a fraction of the distance between other satellites and Earth.
Medium Earth orbit, or MEO, stands between 1,240 and 22,000 miles above the earth. GPS satellites sit in this range.
Right at the start of high earth orbit (HEO) – about 22,000 miles up – sit the satellites of Viasat and Hughes. These satellites go by the moniker of "GEO," which stands for either geosynchronous or geostationary. A geosynchronous satellite orbits the earth in such a way that it remains in a fixed location relative to how people on Earth view it. Geostationary satellites are geosynchronous satellites that align with the Equator. Viasat and Hughes both land in the category of geosynchronous and geostationary. They travel about 7,000 miles per hour in order to stay on track with the Earth's rotation and resist the pull of gravity.
The advantage of GEO satellites in high orbit was their ability to cover a large area and be tracked easily. However, these came with a high cost and a high risk, Hoisington said.
![Avant's Chip Hoisington.jpg Avant's Chip Hoisington.jpg](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt4f2cc38b8afd9624/660ec91cf095661fdf21e67e/1705715809732.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Avant's Chip Hoisington
"You had to have a lot of money to launch these satellites. Because sometimes they just literally get lost in space and there goes $10 million," he said.
As a result, GEO satellites are limited in number. The Union of Concerned Scientists lists the number of GEO satellites at 590, compared to 6,768 in LEO. A limited number of GEO satellites means a limited amount of bandwidth, Hoisington said.
And that has limited the performance. Hoisington said GEO satellites have typically offered download speeds of up to 30 megabits per second (mbps) and upload speeds up to five megabits per second.
But most importantly, the satellites in high Earth orbit have seen high latency.
"That far from the earth, you have approximately 400-700 milliseconds of latency to travel that far of a distance to transmit data," Hoisington said. "That means we're going to have a lot of calls sounds broken up, whereas a high quality voice call needs to be less than 150 milliseconds of latency."
Low Earth orbiters, on the other hand, travel about 17,000 miles per hour to make more than a dozen Earth turns in a day. The speed allows them to stay at a drastically lower altitude and significantly reduce latency.
"In low Earth orbit, now we're only about 300 miles versus 22,000 miles from the distance to the Earth. With that, we're seeing that latency is just about always under 100 milliseconds," Hoisington said.
Hoisington said LEO satellites have proven up to the task of supporting business-class applications and communications.
"It covers all the real-time data needs: voice, video, webinars and stuff like that. Most of the time, we're actually seeing less than 50 milliseconds of latency. So now we're even supporting really tough applications that customers have," he said.
Moreover, the ability to add LEO satellites at a faster rate allows for bandwidth expansion, similar to "adding more fiber to a network," Hoisington said.
He said it is common to see download speeds of 350 mbps and upload speeds of 40 mbps with LEOs. But he believes the technology is capable of higher throughput. He noted that Amazon Kuiper is testing at 400/50 mbps for upload/download. Download bandwidths for LEO could theoretically reach 10 gigabits, Hoisington said.
He added that he expects LEOs to ultimately provide service level agreements (SLAs) around availability, latency and jitter packet loss. For now, however, the phrasing will tend to be SLOs – service level objectives.
LEO has almost become synonymous with SpaceX's Starlink, but it's not the only game in town. Or at least, it won't be, with two other players coming onto the scene.
London-based Eutelsat OneWeb launched in 2019 and now reports 630 LEO satellites about 750 miles above the earth. India's Bharti Global and Japan's Softbank both hold significant stakes in the company, as does the United Kingdom government. Moreover, OneWeb's distribution program boasts several well known telcos, including AT&T, Clarus, Expereo and Telefónica. Interestingly enough, GEO satellite provider Hughes has made one of its terminals compatible with the OneWeb network. Hughes is an investor in OneWeb and a "partner of choice" for managed services.
Still in development is Amazon Kuiper, an initiatives to put 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit. These will orbit between 367 miles and 391 miles above the earth, above Starlink and below OneWeb. Kuiper in November successfully tested two prototype satellites.
These three projects – Starlink, OneWeb and Kuiper – currently form the market, said Dario Talmesio, Omdia global research director for service provider strategy (Omdia is a sister company of Channel Futures.)
"Indeed, these are the heavyweights or the potential heavyweights. Amazon has not even launched the service yet," Talmesio told Channel Futures.
![Omdia's Dario Talmesio Omdia's Dario Talmesio](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt689f69199ac11e1d/660ed84ce2c3241a59637a8b/Talmesio_Dario_Omdia_2024.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Omdia's Dario Talmesio
What is the biggest difference between the three products? Talmesio pointed to branding.
"The main difference between them is that Starlink and Amazon are strong consumer and enterprise brands. They will find it easier to go direct to the end user than any of the traditional satellite operators and any the other LEO operator," he said.
Nitel senior vice president of product Jonathan Petkevich said Starlink is currently far ahead in market share.
"It is fairly dominated by one vendor in the space, and I think that largely speaks to how young the LEO connectivity option really is," Petkevich said.
Petkevich said he expects other LEO providers to emerge onto the market, although how quickly they can send their machines into space is another question.
"It's only a matter of time before we start seeing other countries with LEO providers starting to pop up. Any country that has some form of space capability is going to evaluate it," he told Channel Futures.
Different aggregators Channel Futures spoke to said they are evaluating relationships with OneWeb and Kuiper.
"We plan to add both OneWeb and Amazon as future carrier options when they are fully available," said R.J. Donato, director of solution development at Ntegrated. "We have had conversations and are waiting for completed milestones to bring them into our portfolio."
Max Silber, vice president of mobility and IoT at MetTel, said offering multiple providers in the portfolio generally improves end-user experience and availability.
"I think it's more a factor of what additional complementary coverage or services the other LEO providers could bring to the picture [in addition to Starlink], or what specific use case they're trying to solve for long-term," Silber told Channel Futures.
Silber added that new LEO satellites are getting cellular receivers that make them 3GPP compliant.
"So long-term, we'll have essentially cellular towers in the sky," he said.
Where are customers asking for LEO satellite connectivity?
Aggregators say various industries and locations are calling for the service. In some cases they function as the primary connection in an SD-WAN configuration, but may function as more of a failover option depending on the location.
"We have supplied ocean cargo vessels, fleets of personal yachts and companies ranging from large fast food restaurant chains to ranch resorts," Donato said. "The Starlink services are being used for both primary and secondary connections and now tertiary for some large hospital groups for hurricane emergencies."
Are the LEOs breaking the stereotype of satellite only serving remote or rural locations? Providers say say they've seen urban deployments, but the initial survey seem to indicate a skew toward rural.
Petkevich said Nitel's largest LEO opportunities have tended to be rural, but that's not because of performance problems at urban locations. It's about economics.
"That's generally due to just the pricing advantage that a lot of urban connectivity options have over LEO," he told Channel Futures. "It's typically less expensive to roll in a broadband connection than it is to pull in a LEO secondary or tertiary connection."
Urban adoption of LEO might rise as more providers enter the market and prices go down.
"As more competitors get in and overcome that really expensive barrier to entry to actually start putting satellites up into orbit, I expect the price points will get more and more competitive," Petkevich said.
That will also diversify the number of use cases LEO serves, he said.
What will happen to the rest of the connectivity world if low Earth orbit satellite gains mainstream adoption? Namely, will LEOs take market share from different providers?
Most sources agreed that fiber is here to say, though it may see impact in certain areas.
"In some cases where it's really remote areas and that's really all they need, yes, LEO is going to replace fiber to a degree," BB Telco president Craig Bullock said.
When asked if ILECs and cablecos stand to lose ground, Talmesio says he anticipates only a marginal impact.
"Let’s not forget that the largest provider of LEO connectivity is Starlink with a global customer base of 2.6 million customers," he said. "They are not taking market share from existing cable operators but instead connecting customers that have no other option."
Possible competition might heat up between fixed wireless providers, but Talmesio said he nevertheless sees a "rather small" overlap.
Hoisington said the different iterations of cellular connectivity have improved drastically over the last few years, moving from 4G to 4G LTE, LTE Advanced, 3GPP Release 14 and now 5G.
"If I would have brought up this cellular wireless connectivity question to you the customer two years ago, you would have kicked me out of the office," Hoisington.
But Hoisington said 5G performance and reliability are improving in major coverage areas.
"Wireless connectivity should be a part of every single wide area network. I almost think it's a race between LEO and the likes of the cellular providers. Can we build out that 5G infrastructure quicker than we can launch 1,000 satellites? Who knows?" he said. "But what's cool is, there's a place for both, because we have fiber."
Aggregators told Channel Futures that they see LEO as a "additive" to existing access types they've been providing to customers.
"We believe it's a complement at this point," Silber said. "I think financially for someone to completely decommission all their wireline services and switch 100% to Starlink doesn't always meet budget. So currently, it's still a strong complement."
Some customers may choose to go all the way with LEO, however.
"In some locations where available connectivity has always been problematic, or throughput hasn't been as strong, this has been a permanent solution for that organization to implement," he said.
Partners who sell LEO through said the aggregators naturally need to mark up the prices with their own value-added services.
Aggregators deliver Starlink as a managed service, as well as installation services. And for Silber, that management is key for an enterprise-grade experience.
![MetTel's Max Silber MetTel's Max Silber](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt647cb09ffe2cfba0/660edaf11f044b1164fb8041/Silber_Max_MetTel_2024.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
MetTel's Max Silber
"Starlink does not really provide that live 24/7/365 support that most large organizations would expect when using this to connect to their infrastructure," he said.
Some aggregators, such as MetTel, have actual inventory for Starlink that lets them make repairs on customers' antenna equipment.
Silber said that's it's rare arrangement that required "a very large capital investment" on MetTel's part.
"MetTel saw this as a very important opportunity to be able to have that as part of how we complement network installations," he said.
Hoisington said the residual commissions agents receive from aggregators on Starlink will resemble what they historically have earned.
"The pricing will come down just through the nature of competition. The service levels will go up. I think it will be a land grab. Will you make money? Yes. The commission should be similar to telecom, but where where I think the money will be made is the volume," he said.
Not all aggregators are compensating partners for the Starlink service but rather for their monthly management. In other cases, partners won't get any compensation for the actual antenna the aggregator installs.
Multiple partners told Channel Futures that they've liked how Ntegrated has compensated them for the actual Starlink service.
Donato said Ntegrated is trying to treat LEO as it would any other connectivity type.
"We actually added Starlink with the intention of having another wireless and satellite carrier, but it proved more popular than our other high orbit satellite offerings for many reasons," he said. "Ntegrated wanted Starlink compensation to be exactly like any other normal monthly circuit order to eliminate confusion on pricing and choices thus our commissions are against the entire circuit order. We classify Starlink as a non-SLA broadband wireless provider."
Massachusetts-based TechChoice was one of the first technology advisors to source MetTel's Starlink offering for a customer.
Many of the client's locations are located in remote areas. Moreover, the business' operations required high performance cameras, alarm systems and real-time applications that required high resiliency and low latency.
The customer will have deployed up to 150 locations with Starlink by the end of the year, TechChoice president Paul Storella said.
“We would rather have a broadband line everywhere. It's bigger, faster and cheaper. But the nature of this customer is probably going to lead to 60 or 70% Starlink for its locations," Storella said.
The customer previously wasn't using any terrestrial/wireline connectivity, owing to its remote location. It attempted to use internet connectivity from a high Earth orbit satellite provider, but to disappointing results.
“VPN over high orbit satellites produced too much latency to be viable," Storella said.
The client then tried the mobility route, installing dual SIM cards at its location. While cellular connectivity improved over high Earth orbit satellite, it still wasn't cutting it.
The customer asked for TechChoice's help identifying a LEO solution. TechChoice went on a lengthy search for a provider that could resell, install and manage Starlink.
Storella said TechChoice and the customer have discussed running Starlink alongside secondary lines of connectivity, but he said it's likely that MetTel's Starlink will be the sole option at most locations.
Silber encouraged partners to take a close look at the customer use case before recommending a LEO solution.
"There are typically several ways of doing it so that ultimately you have both technically a very strong solution, but also one that fits your customer's budget. LEO is a good option, but as far as a large network deployment, it's not necessarily the only option in that deployment," he said.
Storella encouraged fellow partners to heavily vet their providers of LEO satellite connectivity.
“In some situations, one can work better than the other. There's rebill versus wholesale versus resale. There are some different solutions under the hood," he said.
Storella said some aggregators add equipment to achieve better bandwidth and a different SLA.
"Some of them are putting two nodes out there with equipment in between them to increase bandwidth and increase service level, which can be fine, but its not always transparent. Don't just take it and say, 'Hey, they've got a better deal.' Understand what it is, because there are different physical requirements that a customer might or might not support," Storella said.
Storella encouraged fellow partners to heavily vet their providers of LEO satellite connectivity.
“In some situations, one can work better than the other. There's rebill versus wholesale versus resale. There are some different solutions under the hood," he said.
Storella said some aggregators add equipment to achieve better bandwidth and a different SLA.
"Some of them are putting two nodes out there with equipment in between them to increase bandwidth and increase service level, which can be fine, but its not always transparent. Don't just take it and say, 'Hey, they've got a better deal.' Understand what it is, because there are different physical requirements that a customer might or might not support," Storella said.
Internet connectivity from low earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers is available for channel partners and the businesses they serve.
Elon Musk's Starlink is a household name for most people in the technology world, but channel partners – particularly those in the technology advisor/agent space – have for years been investigating how they can sell the technology. Now that answer is coming into sight. Telecom aggregators are signing up as authorized Starlink resellers and offer a managed service that agents can source.
"The aggregators are getting into the space big time," said Chip Hoisington, who leads Avant's connectivity and colocation engineering practice. "I was begging everybody to form partnerships with these guys, so I'm glad they did."
Partners have been selling satellite providers such as Viasat and Hughes for years, but often those solutions have only come in handy for remote rural locations where wireline connectivity is impossible. Partners say low Earth orbit projects like Starlink, Amazon Kuiper and Eutelsat OneWeb promise more ubiquitous access with dramatically lower latency.
"I have recommended Starlink to businesses in remote areas and they have all been happy with it. They've run VoIP through them, and it works fine," said BB Telco president Craig Bullock, who didn't have a way to sell Starlink until recently. "I give my clients every option under the sun, including options that are not something that I recommend. Often they choose Starlink because it's the name they recognize."
But up until recently, selling Starlink wasn't a possibility for partners like BB Telco.
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BB Telco's Craig Bullock
Demand has been increasing for LEO satellite connectivity from business customers. Hoisington said he conducted an internal survey of Avant's sales team and found that the tech services distributor is getting upward of 150 requests for LEO per week.
Partners Tap Into Starlink Distribution
Now technology advisors are vetting a wave of new Starlink resellers they can recommend to their clients.
Starlink's website lists 62 authorized resellers. That elite company features many businesses that sell through technology services distributors (TSDs) and agents, including MetTel. And many aggregators well-known to agents, including Ntegrated and Epic.io. are participating in Peplink's Starlink Solution Provider Program. Nitel announced a low Earth orbit satellite offering through an unnamed provider.
The aggregators resell the service on their own paper and provide installation and management services. The sourcing agent gets a residual commission.
Moreover, it diversifies the access types partners can offer to their clients to support their wide area networks.
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TechChoice's Paul Storella
"It's an access type that works and is strong in different situations. That's all it is to me. Having something else in our portfolio that's productized, and projectized with vendor partners is ideal. It's something else we can do for our clients. It's a good thing,” TechChoice president Paul Storella told Channel Futures.
We reached out to the big three low Earth orbit satellite providers: SpaceX's Starlink, Amazon Kuiper and Eutelsat OneWeb. As of deadline, only Amazon Kuiper had responded. A spokesperson said the group has not yet determined its go-to-market strategy.
“Project Kuiper may pursue a combination of direct and indirect sales according to the rules and customer preferences in each country where we plan to offer service," the spokesperson said.
Read the 11 slides above for a conversation about the different satellite providers, the aggregators reselling their solutions, and how partners are finding success selling low Earth orbit satellite services.
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