Satellite internet cost splits into two numbers that behave differently. Hardware runs from about 2,500 USD for a small LEO flat panel to about 45,000 USD for a single stabilised maritime dome. Airtime runs from 120 USD a month on a consumer plan to 9,000 USD or more for committed VSAT bandwidth, with installation between 1,500 and 15,000 USD.
Multi terminal sites push that figure higher again, and a rig with redundant antennas can pass 70,000 USD. Every figure here is indicative, taken from quotes we priced in 2026, and pricing moves, so treat the ranges as a starting point.
What does the terminal hardware cost?
Capex is the number buyers fixate on, and across three years it is usually the smaller half of the bill. It still decides what is possible, because a flat panel on a container roof and a 2.4m dish on a concrete pad are different projects. These are the classes we quote from our VSAT products range.
| Terminal class | Typical VSAT hardware capex (USD) | Where it fits | Practical notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small LEO flat panel | 2,500 to 6,000 | Camps, offices, small craft, backup paths | Two people and a mast clamp. Land models are unstabilised. |
| Stabilised maritime dome, 60cm to 1m | 18,000 to 45,000 | Vessels needing an SLA or a fixed IP | Deck reinforcement, radar clearance, long cable runs |
| Electronically steered flat panel | 22,000 to 40,000 | Low profile vessels and vehicles, air draught limits | No moving parts, low windage, higher price per Mbps |
| Fixed site 1.8m to 2.4m, 4W to 25W BUC | 9,000 to 32,000 | Mines, rigs, gateways, dedicated carriers | Foundation, alignment survey, lightning protection |
| Portable 1.2m flyaway case set | 12,000 to 26,000 | Field deployments, surveys, emergency response | Freight and customs often exceed the rental value |
Two things move those figures more than the spec sheet does. A moving platform needs a gyro stabilised or electronically steered antenna, and that mechanism accounts for most of the gap between a 3,000 USD land terminal and a 30,000 USD dome. Transmit power does the rest: a 25W block upconverter in place of a 4W unit can add around 8,000 USD, and you need it only where the link budget says so, and any vendor worth quoting will send that budget on request.
On a vessel the antenna gets chosen by air draught, radar shadow and deck space long before price enters the room, and maritime VSAT pricing sits at the top of the range for that reason. Add flare heat and blast zones and you can see why VSAT for oil and gas installs carry more engineering hours than almost anything else we quote.
What do you actually pay for airtime each month?
Satellite airtime cost is where the widest gaps hide, because the industry sells two quite different units under one heading.
| Plan type | Typical monthly (USD) | Contention | What you are buying |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer or roaming LEO | 120 to 400 per site | Heavily shared, no guarantee | Cheap capacity, best effort, no service credits |
| Enterprise LEO with a priority pool | 500 to 3,500 per site | Prioritised until the pool empties | Predictable speed up to your quota, slow after it |
| Contended shared VSAT, Ka or Ku band | 350 to 2,500 per site | Usually 1:10 to 1:50 | A small committed floor inside a shared pipe |
| Committed information rate VSAT | 400 to 1,200 per Mbps | 1:1 on the committed portion | Capacity reserved for you at 03:00 and 20:00 |
| Dedicated SCPC carrier | 900 to 2,800 per Mbps | 1:1, symmetrical | Stable latency and jitter for control traffic and voice |
The unit changes partway down that table. LEO plans are priced per site. Committed information rate pricing is quoted per megabit, so a 6 Mbps committed link at 700 USD per Mbps becomes a 4,200 USD line item before support. VSAT cost per month therefore turns on how much of your peak you have reserved, and reserved capacity stays yours through the evening crew rush.
Geography moves the per megabit price too. Capacity over the Gulf, West Africa and Central Asia has typically carried a premium over the same megabit in Europe, because supply is thinner and demand clusters. That premium shifts each time a new satellite is brought over the region, so price it when you buy. High throughput Ka band spot beams narrowed the gap where they reach, and LEO and MEO capacity narrowed it further, though priority policy varies by operator. For drilling telemetry or a voice trunk, a dedicated SCPC carrier still wins on jitter at a worse price per bit.
What does installation and commissioning cost?
A land install with a mast, a short cable run and no crane usually runs 1,500 USD to 4,000 USD including the survey. A fixed 2.4m antenna with a poured foundation, lightning protection and a rack build sits nearer 8,000 USD to 20,000 USD, and most of that is civil work and travel. Maritime retrofits run 6,000 USD to 15,000 USD of engineering time, before the yard costs below.
Commissioning itself is a day or two: pointing and peaking, a cross polarisation check with the teleport, throughput and latency tests, then routing, firewall and handover. A quote that never mentions a commissioning report is worth questioning, because that report is the only record of day one performance. Our professional services team treats it as the deliverable.
Which costs do buyers forget?
- Freight and customs. On recent jobs, getting a dome to a vessel in a port like Luanda has run 1,200 USD to 6,000 USD, and a stalled clearance costs more in vessel time than the antenna did. Practice varies by market, as we set out for VSAT services in Angola.
- Crane, riggers and scaffolding. Yard labour to lift and mount a dome has typically run 800 USD to 2,500 USD a day, and rates move with the local yard market. Losing a weather window can double the bill.
- Class approval and drawings. Some owners want approved arrangement drawings before anything is welded, so budget engineering hours and calendar weeks.
- Spare parts holding. A spare BUC, LNB and modem for a fleet or camp ties up 4,000 USD to 12,000 USD on a shelf, which still beats a week offline.
- Licence fees. Many countries require a VSAT licence or type approval, and where fees apply they have ranged from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per terminal each year. Schedules change, so confirm the current position with the regulator.
- Tax. VAT, duty and, in some jurisdictions, withholding tax on cross border service payments can add a double digit percentage to the landed cost, and it rarely shows on a first quote. Ask your finance team about your contracting entity.
Why can two quotes for the same site differ so widely?
Contention ratio
A shared plan sold at 1:10 gives every customer real headroom at peak. The same plan sold at 1:50 is far cheaper to produce and feels perfectly good at 04:00. In our experience most complaints about slow satellite internet come down to contention rather than weather, so ask for the ratio in writing; a vendor who will not put it on paper usually has a reason.
Committed versus best effort
Best effort means the brochure number is a ceiling you might touch overnight. A committed rate is a floor you get at any hour. A 20 Mbps best effort plan and a 4 Mbps committed plan can carry the same price tag, and for a control system the 4 Mbps is the better purchase.
Service level and NOC coverage
Response targets, round the clock monitoring and a named escalation path cost money to provide, so a quote carrying a four hour target sits above one offering an email address. Where an hour offline halts production, a NOC that sees the modem drop before the site does earns that difference back.
Bought or leased hardware
Leasing folds the terminal into the monthly, typically adding 250 USD to 1,200 USD by class, and normally includes replacement hardware. Set those rates against the capex table and buying pays for itself somewhere between one and three years for most classes, sooner on the cheapest panels, before you price the replacement cover a lease includes. Run the crossover on your own cost of capital and refresh cycle, comparing total cost over the term instead of the monthly.
What do four typical sites actually pay?
| Site profile | Typical setup | Service | Monthly airtime (USD) | Hardware capex (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coastal support vessel, 14 crew | 1m Ku band dome or LEO flat panel | 4 Mbps best effort, 512 kbps committed | 900 to 2,200 | 2,500 to 45,000 |
| Deepwater rig, 120 people, live drilling data | Two 2.4m Ku or C band antennas plus two LEO terminals | 10 Mbps committed plus two enterprise LEO | 5,000 to 19,000 | 23,000 to 76,000 |
| Mine camp, 300 residents, ERP and CCTV | 2.4m Ka band plus two LEO terminals | 20 Mbps shared with a 4 Mbps floor | 4,500 to 11,000 | 14,000 to 44,000 |
| Field clinic, 12 staff | LEO flat panel plus a satellite handset | 500 GB priority then best effort | 350 to 900 | 3,500 to 7,500 |
Those rows assume commercial terms and a normal risk profile. Conflict zones and single site deals push the monthly up. Fleet agreements pull it down, sometimes by a quarter, because capacity can be pooled across sites that peak at different hours: a camp and an office two time zones apart sharing one pool is close to a free saving, and a common pattern in mining connectivity contracts.
Why is cost per usable GB the number to compare?
Divide the monthly by the gigabytes you can realistically move during your working hours, then run that sum on every quote. A 900 USD plan delivering 300 usable GB costs 3.00 USD per GB. A 2,400 USD committed plan reliably delivering 900 usable GB costs about 2.67 USD per GB, and it delivers at 20:00 when the crew is calling home. Comparing satellite internet cost this way tends to reorder a shortlist.
Usable is doing the work in that sentence. The deductions are capacity you cannot reach at peak, data blocked by a fair access policy once your pool empties, and throughput lost to rain fade. We have seen plans that looked twice as cheap per advertised megabit come out dearer per usable gigabyte once a site logged a real month, which only your own measurements will show.
Has LEO really changed the entry price?
It has. A camp that once needed tens of thousands of dollars of hardware and a four figure monthly bill can now get a working link for a few thousand in hardware and a low hundreds monthly, on current consumer and roaming pricing. Entry level satellite internet cost has fallen hardest there. Check the operator rate card before budgeting, because these plans reprice far more often than long term capacity contracts.
What LEO has not changed is determinism. Consumer grade plans are generally deprioritised under load, coverage is uneven across ocean regions and national markets, and service credits are typically absent. Terms differ by operator and change often, so confirm all three before you sign. If a stopped process costs you 200,000 USD a day, the cheapest link is not the cheapest option.
Why does a hybrid design often cost less than either single path?
The pattern we specify most often on new rig and vessel builds is a modest committed geostationary link for anything that must never stop, one or two LEO terminals for bulk traffic, and an SD WAN router steering each application to the path that suits it. Voice and telemetry ride the committed side; backups, updates and crew traffic ride the cheap capacity, and a session can survive one path degrading.
Hybrid satellite link cost usually comes out well below an all committed design at the same effective availability, often by a third or more in the cases we price, because covering peak demand with committed bandwidth alone is expensive, while betting a whole site on best effort is cheap only until the week it is not. The saving depends on how much of your traffic genuinely needs the committed path, so model a hybrid satellite link against your own application mix.
What should you check before you sign?
- Get the contention ratio and the committed floor in writing, per plan.
- Get the link budget, including rain fade margin for your exact location.
- Total the three year satellite internet cost: hardware, install, freight, monthly, licence fees and tax.
- Confirm what the service level pays out and who answers the phone at 02:00 local.
- Price the spares holding and decide who owns it, you or the provider.
- Check licence and type approval rules for every country the asset will work in.
- Calculate cost per usable GB on every quote and lay the numbers side by side.
What happens next?
Send us the site or vessel, the applications that must not fail, the head count and the availability figure you are held to. We will come back with two or three costed designs, each listing hardware, monthly, install and the forgotten items separately. Start on the contact page and we will get options back as quickly as we can, usually within a few working days.
