April 30, 2024
As an authorized solution provider of Business Starlink, we at Metro Wireless routinely provide commercial installation and setup services to our Managed Starlink customers. We take pride in providing white glove installation that looks polished and relieves clients from the stress of their own deployments.
In this guide, we’ll detail the typical steps that go into an average Managed Business Starlink deployment, including installation, setup, and testing.
As you see in this post’s installation photos, this large oil & gas client had an existing LTE/5G wireless internet connection including a Peplink BR1 Pro 5G modem and outdoor directional antenna. That’s because we work with this client across their multiple jobsites and construction sites nationwide providing Managed LTE/5G Wireless Internet, typically with unlimited data packages.
This site had three trailers for the client, with the main trailer having a higher number of users that required rock solid connectivity.
Unfortunately, this site is located at a particularly large jobsite in Stanton, Tennessee, where a new manufacturing facility is being built.
That’s led to what we call ‘trailer farms’ of high volumes of users congesting the local cell towers. No matter what our team at Metro Wireless could throw at it— including testing all three cellular carriers (Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T) and professionally installing outdoor directional antennas— we couldn’t get sufficient throughput for this client.
We did a root cause analysis and found that while we could attain a good signal from the outdoor antenna (and indoor mounted Peplink modem) to the cell tower a mile away, the cell tower itself wasn’t providing adequate bandwidth throughout. Again, this is likely due to high amounts of users congesting the only available tower in the area.
Via the Peplink modem’s configuration settings, our NOC engineers tested multiple frequencies and bands, including a selection of legacy LTE bands (which we find sometimes perform better than 5G in these situations!), but to no avail.
I will shamelessly note that this type of troubleshooting and expertise we provide is a reason why business clients and their users look to us as the ‘wireless experts’ in providing their Managed Cellular and Starlink wireless internet solutions. Our customers would rather avoid dealing with this headache, and instead leave it to us to handle.
Starlink only recently came out with their Authorized Solution Provider program, allowing Metro Wireless to become an official Starlink reseller. This meant that many of our commercial customers had previously tried Starlink on their own with varying degrees of success.
This client was the same— they had tried Starlink in the past —but did not have a great experience. Further, they couldn’t recall whether they tried the proper commercial Starlink, or the residential version.
Read more about the various Business and Residential Starlink hardware and services plans here.
As a result, they were understandably hesitant to try our solution as they believed their Starlink experience couldn’t be any better. Fortunately, every crisis leads to opportunity, and we were given the opportunity to install our Managed Starlink for them.
With our recommendation that Starlink was finally ready for primetime, our customer agreed to procuring the new High Performance Dish from us along with our Managed Starlink service, specifically the Priority 1Tb plan. This was a good plan option for them given multiple users will be relying on this for their primary internet connection.
This client typically elects for our white glove professional installation, as we have a strong track record of seamless installations that never lead to issues (or building leaks!) down the road.
More on that later.
Along with every Managed Starlink deployment, Metro Wireless is including an LTE/5G SIM card for failover usage and for out-of-band-management (OOBM). Our standard deployment includes a 1Gb metered data plan, with overages assessed at $15/Gb.
This is important to have, as the Starlink network can still occasionally have outages despite a recent vastly improved network. Therefore it’s critical to have a failover connection.
Our team also uses that LTE/5G SIM connection to remotely log into the deployment via OOBM to perform troubleshooting for our customers when their Starlink connection is offline.
Rather cheap insurance, we think.
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Another thing we offer as an official Starlink reseller and managed provider is the capability to bond and aggregate multiple Starlink connections together along with LTE and 5G wireless cellular connections.
To say it louder for the folks in the back- Starlink does not directly offer the ability to aggregate multiple Starlink dishes for faster speeds, but Metro Wireless does!
Users will want to elect for this when they need faster speeds than a single business Starlink connection alone would typically provide, or when they demand carrier redundancy and high availability connectivity.
We’ve heard stories about cruise ships using up to 17 Starlink High Performance dishes and connections aggregated together to provide internet and WiFi access to all its cruise ship passengers.
For this client, they opted to retain their unlimited 5G connection, albeit being a slower connection at current— rumor has it the jobsite is getting more cell towers and capacity soon— and opting to bond it together with their new Starlink connection.
This will provide our oil & gas client two awesome benefits:
We provide a single Static IP Block, including /30, /29, /28, and yes /24 options, which remain unchanged even if the Starlink or 5G connection have an outage.
As part of any professional installation Metro Wireless performs, we take care of procuring all the odds and ends included for typical installation materials, such as wiring and mounting kits, pipe mount adapters, Unistrut, NEMA rated enclosures, drill bits and drilling needs, etc.
Our white glove process always leads to a clean and polished installation, and it’s certainly helpful in getting called back to more job sites. Internally, the Metro Wireless team calls our lead installer, Mr. Clean!
As we continue to roll out more business Starlink deployments, we’ll refine our installation procedures, but as of current, we’re suggesting that most users opt to install Starlink directly on the roof, via a Unistrut and pipe mount on the side of the building, or with a supported J-mount (typically seen with satellite dishes).
As a warning, because of the Starlink High Performance Dish’s increased weight over the lighter and smaller Standard residential dish, our lead installer maintains concern that unsupported J-mount installations of the business Starlink hardware might later lead to breaks and damages.
Hence, for now, we’ll only be performing more robust installations for our clients, either directly on the rooftops with non-penetrating mount pads, or via wall side pipe mounts and Unistrut. This is how we perform our commercial fixed wireless internet installations.
Again, you can avoid this headache and instead gain peace of mind if you hire a professional Starlink installer like Metro Wireless!
Once on-site, our field installer performed the installation without issue. For this install site, we deployed a pipe mount adapter mounted to the Starlink High Performance dish, all mounted via a pipe mounted against Unistrut.
Construction trailers also have the option for a rooftop installation with no holes being drilled (perhaps even just mounting the dish to a wood board for temporary needs), but we wanted something sturdier here.
On the inside, we mounted the required Starlink power supply and our Peplink modem on the wall, but these could also be table mounted. Notice on the Peplink router you’ll see the white antenna cables for the 5G outdoor antenna seen outside.
As we already had our Peplink router installed for the 5G wireless internet service, we didn’t need to install a new router that day. Our installer simply connected the ethernet cable from the Starlink High Performance dish into the Peplink modem’s WAN port. From there, the client plugged an ethernet jumper cable from our Peplink hardware into their firewall handoff.
Finally, our installer contacted our NOC engineers who remotely logged into the device to optimize the Starlink and Peplink settings for that site’s deployment.
Easy peezy.
We were grateful to rise to the occasion for this valued client’s Starlink needs. Our professional installation led to a clean result with a fast setup to get them the reliable connectivity they required.
As part of our Managed Starlink service, we’ve since monitored this connection closely and haven’t observed any outages yet. Further, we haven’t gotten any support tickets from the client about bandwidth or latency issues.
We’ll continue to check in with them periodically, but we feel good that this was the right solution for their needs.
Shameless plug – please contact us for any business Starlink needs!
