How to choose a satellite internet provider comes down to five checks made before price enters the conversation. Find out who controls the space segment, whether your committed information rate is contractual, what the SLA measures and pays when missed, who holds the licence in your country, and how long a dead terminal stays dead.
Those five open into the ten questions below. The last section turns the answers into a scorecard you can lift into a tender document.
Which kind of company is actually selling to you?
Three very different businesses will send you a near identical PDF. An operator owns the satellite. A service provider buys capacity wholesale and runs or leases the hub, holding the licences and staffing a network operations centre, the NOC. A reseller forwards your order and adds a margin.
None of the three is automatically wrong. A reseller with people and stock already in Luanda can beat a distant operator on install speed and customs clearance for VSAT service in Angola. Knowing which one sits across the table tells you who answers at 2am and whether anybody in the chain can change a hub configuration.
One question settles it. Do you own the hub, and is the space segment leased in your own name? A provider running its own ground infrastructure answers in one sentence, and a reseller talks about partnerships.
How to choose a satellite internet provider: the questions that separate bidders
Do you own or lease the space segment, and on what term?
Leasing is normal, and what matters is the term. A provider on a rolling monthly wholesale arrangement can lose beam capacity the moment the wholesaler reprices, while one holding a committed lease on a named beam can put throughput into a contract.
Find out which satellite and which beam. Then ask whether your capacity is pooled or dedicated, because a pipe with no sharing at all is SCPC, or single channel per carrier, and it prices well above shared service at the same headline rate. Ask for both quotes side by side.
What is the contention ratio?
In our experience, far more complaints about slow satellite internet trace back to contention than to weather. The ratio tells you how many customers share a pool of bandwidth. On a 1:20 service sold as up to 20 Mbps you might see close to 20 Mbps at 4am, and if all twenty pull at once the pool divides to roughly 1 Mbps each. Ask what the beam actually measured in your busy hour last month.
A camp of forty people checking email absorbs that swing. A rig streaming vibration data to shore for offshore oil and gas operations cannot. A ratio means little without the committed information rate underneath it, and a quote showing a burst figure with neither is selling a best case.
Is the committed information rate written into the contract?
Sales material carries no weight here. The CIR has to appear in the signed schedule. We have seen buyers accept 4 Mbps CIR in a slide deck, then sign an agreement referencing only up to figures, which left them nothing to enforce. Put the CIR and the ratio into an annex the master agreement names, with the measurement point and method beside them.
What does the satellite SLA measure, and what is the remedy?
Satellite service level agreements tend to fall apart at this point. A 99.5% availability guarantee reads well until you find it covers the space segment alone. The modem and antenna sit outside the measurement. So do site power and the terrestrial tail, along with anything classed as force majeure. Rain fade at Ka band through a tropical wet season is predictable, and it will end up excluded if you let it be.
Remedies deserve the same scrutiny. A credit worth two days of the monthly fee will not come close to what a twelve hour outage costs the operation. Service credits are almost never sized against your losses, so read them as a signal of how seriously a provider takes uptime. Ask when a senior engineer gets assigned by name and whether credits scale with outage length.
Who is in the NOC at 3am on a Friday?
Every provider claims 24/7 cover, so test it. Call the support line at an inconvenient hour and see who picks up, in which language, and whether they can read your terminal telemetry while you are on the phone. Satellite NOC support that can reconfigure a modem overnight is a different product from the kind that logs a ticket until morning, so ask how many engineers sit the overnight shift and what they can change without waking a manager. Our own 24/7 NOC monitoring and support is staffed overnight.
What is the mean time to repair at my site?
Ask for mean time to repair, or MTTR, on a per site basis. A global average blends every site a provider runs into one figure, so it says little about yours. Replacing a failed block upconverter, the BUC behind the feed, on a platform 180 km offshore means a helicopter and a weather window. At a mine 400 km from the nearest airstrip it means a truck and a permit.
Ranges we typically quote, and confirm per site before contract, run from four to twelve hours where we hold local spares and staff, out to one to three days where an engineer travels, and longer if customs sits in the path. Ask any provider for its own site schedule figures.
Spares are the natural follow up question. Ask where they are held and who owns them, then ask whether a hot spare modem and BUC sit in the rack. On a revenue critical site a spares kit costs less than a week of downtime, though on a low value site the sum goes the other way. Run that comparison with your own numbers before you decline it.
Do you hold the licence in my country?
VSAT licensing is where a cheap proposal turns into an operational problem. Running an unlicensed terminal can get equipment seized and your local entity fined, and in some jurisdictions liability can reach named individuals instead of stopping at the company, so take local legal advice before you sign. Get the licence holder, the licence number and the regulator, then confirm the licence covers your band and terminal type.
Filing routes and type approval requirements differ between markets, and local partner rules differ with them. All three change. Requirements for VSAT service in Nigeria will not match the ones covering VSAT service in Iraq.
Some vendors sell into countries where they hold no landing rights and rely on nobody asking. When a quote for VSAT service in Saudi Arabia arrives with no licence number attached, confirm the current position with the national regulator before assuming that a licence travels.
Who owns the hardware when the contract ends?
You either buy the terminal or lease it. A third route hands it over free inside a longer service commitment, and that is the trap, because a subsidised modem locked to one operator network carries an unpriced switching cost. Ask whether the terminal is operator locked and what the buyout looks like at each anniversary. Removal costs belong in the same answer.
What happens to my IP addressing and VPN?
Addressing eats weeks when it goes wrong. Establish whether you get public static addresses and how many, then ask whether you sit behind carrier grade NAT by default. If you run IPsec tunnels back to a corporate data centre, ask about MTU handling and what happens to TCP acceleration once traffic is encrypted. Acceleration usually stops helping there, so SD WAN over satellite suits multi site enterprises better than raw tunnels.
Can you give me references in my sector and region?
Two customers in the same industry and the same region, contactable by phone. Ask each of them one specific question: what happened the last time the link was down for more than four hours. A provider with no sector reference may still be capable, though you will be the pilot project.
How do you read a satellite internet quote properly?
Align the units before comparing anything. Bad decisions here start with a CIR number sitting next to a burst number in the same column.
| What the quote says | What to ask | What it often means |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 100 Mbps | What is the CIR and the contention ratio? | Burst speed at 4am, busy hour delivery a fraction of that |
| 99.5% availability | Measured where? Is rain fade inside the measurement? | Space segment only, weather excluded |
| Free hardware | Operator locked? What is the buyout schedule? | A 36 month commitment with heavy exit fees |
| 24/7 support | How many engineers overnight, and what can they change? | Monitoring plus a ticket queue until morning |
| Installation included | Does that include civil works and customs clearance? | Labour only, site preparation billed later |
| Licensed service | Whose licence, which number, which regulator? | A partner licence, or none at all |
Cheap quotes tend to go quiet on the same cost lines. Look for the early termination formula, overage or fair use throttling, annual price escalation and the charge for moving a site. A quote silent on all four may cost more across the term.
A vendor scorecard you can copy
Score each bidder 0 to 5 per row against the VSAT procurement checklist below, multiply by the weight and total it. The weights sum to 43, so a perfect score is 215, and they suit a remote industrial site with thin onsite IT. A broadcaster pushes CIR and jitter up, while an NGO field office pushes install lead time and cost up. A bidder that wins on price while losing on CIR in contract, SLA scope, MTTR at my site and local licence will look like the winner in the spreadsheet and cost more in the first year.
| Criterion | Weight | What a 5 looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Space segment control | 3 | Committed lease in own name on a named beam |
| CIR in contract | 5 | CIR, ratio and measurement method in a signed annex |
| SLA scope | 5 | Terminal to gateway, rain fade included |
| SLA remedy | 3 | Credits scaling with outage length, named escalation path |
| NOC staffing | 4 | Engineers on shift overnight, authorised to reconfigure |
| MTTR at my site | 5 | Documented per site figure, spares held locally |
| Local licence | 5 | Number and holder supplied, band and terminal covered |
| Hardware terms | 2 | Unlocked terminal, buyout schedule, no removal charge |
| IP and VPN handling | 3 | Portable public addressing, VPN throughput tested |
| Sector references | 4 | Two contactable customers, same industry, same region |
| Total cost over term | 4 | Exit and overage terms disclosed, site moves priced |
When is a hybrid or multi orbit design the right answer?
Multi orbit adds hardware and configuration work, and it adds monthly cost. These are the cases where it pays for itself.
- The link carries traffic that cannot stop: safety systems, dynamic positioning telemetry, plant control, medical evacuation coordination.
- Latency drives the application. Control loops and interactive voice written for terrestrial round trips struggle on a long satellite path. A measured GEO round trip usually falls around 550 to 650 ms once gateway and terrestrial hops are counted, against roughly 30 to 60 ms typically reported on LEO, which brings much of that traffic into a workable range. Ask for measured figures on your own route.
- You operate across a coverage gap: high latitudes, polar routing, a thinning beam edge.
- You need diversity against a single point of failure, whether one teleport or one regulatory regime.
A well engineered single orbit link with a real CIR will still outperform a badly integrated hybrid satellite network, since most of the value sits in the integration work. Failover has to be policy based and tested on a schedule. A hybrid satellite link built that way earns its extra monthly cost. At sea a maritime VSAT deployment will often keep the GEO carrier live even when the LEO terminal performs well, since heavy weather is when failover is really tested.
What should procurement do next?
Sequence matters here nearly as much as the questions. The order in which you run a VSAT provider selection keeps the commercial conversation until the end, where it belongs.
- Write the real requirement per site: CIR floor, peak concurrent users, the applications that must keep running, and the longest tolerable outage.
- Send that document to every bidder and ask for CIR, contention ratio, SLA scope and per site MTTR in a table.
- Collect licence numbers and verify at least one independently with the national regulator.
- Call the NOC unannounced at an awkward hour and note what the person on shift can do.
- Score the responses, then negotiate the two weakest rows before you negotiate the monthly price.
If you already hold quotes, send them over and we will mark up which figures are contractual and which are marketing. Talk to our engineering team and bring your site list along with an honest figure for how long you can run with the link down.
