Starlink for Australian Business: When It Makes Sense

Starlink is a genuinely good answer for a small number of Australian business situations and a genuinely bad answer for a larger number. The deciding factors are almost never speed. They are the contract you are actually on, whether you can get a public IP, whether you have clear sky, and whether the site can tolerate a link that its own operator describes as not suited to mission-critical use.

Starlink is SpaceX’s low earth orbit satellite internet service: it connects a dish at your premises to satellites orbiting at about 550 km, rather than the 35,786 km of a geostationary satellite, which is why its latency is measured in tens of milliseconds instead of hundreds.

The first thing to check is which plan you are contractually allowed to use

Starlink’s Australian plan names changed. The old Business, Priority, Mobile Priority and Maritime names are retired. What Starlink publishes for Australia today is:

• Residential Max, Residential 200 Mbps, Residential 100 Mbps and Residential Lite for fixed premises.
• Roam (Unlimited, 100 GB and 300 GB) for land mobility and personal use.
• Local Priority and Global Priority, the business tiers.
• Standby Mode, a paused state.

“Starlink Business” now describes an account type, not a plan. If you have an account manager telling you that you are “on Starlink Business”, ask which service plan the line is actually on.

Then read this, because it is the single most commercially important line in Starlink’s Australian documentation. The Service Plan Descriptions state that Residential Max, Residential, Residential Lite and Roam Unlimited are not permitted for business or enterprise uses. Plenty of Australian businesses are quietly running on a Residential plan because it was cheaper and it worked. That is a breach of the service terms, and it is also the plan tier with the technical limitations that break business applications. Both problems are fixed by the same decision.

What the priority tiers actually change

Local Priority and Global Priority differ from Residential in ways that matter more than the headline speed:

• Network precedence. Starlink states that priority data is given network precedence over Residential and Roam data, so users typically see faster and more consistent speeds.
• A public IPv4 address is available, toggled in the account dashboard. It is not available on Residential or Roam.
• No CGNAT session limit. Residential and Roam are capped at 1,200 concurrent sessions. Priority is not.
• 24/7 prioritised support, ticket-based, with phone contact by callback requested through the ticket.
• A telemetry dashboard and multi-site management, plus in-motion use up to 160 km/h.
• Business account handling such as modified invoicing and tax exemption certificates, which Starlink says is not available on Residential or Roam.

There is also a real, published SLA, which is unusual for satellite and worth understanding precisely.

The Priority Plan SLA, read properly

Starlink’s Priority Plan Service Level Agreement commits to 99.9 per cent network availability per monthly billing period, on Local Priority and Global Priority only. The mechanics are where it gets interesting:

• Connectivity to the point of presence is checked every second, but a failure must persist for at least 60 continuous seconds before any of it counts as outage time. A satellite link that drops for 20 seconds forty times a day accrues zero measured outage.
• The remedy is a 20 per cent service credit on that line’s base monthly cost, expressly stated as your sole and exclusive remedy. Credits expire after 24 months.
• You must raise a ticket within 14 days if an outage was not automatically recorded.
• It does not apply to Mini Kits, Data Pools, Impact Plans or Bonded Gateways.
• It is voided by obstruction. The exclusions include any obstruction of the sky view, non-compliant installation, unstable power, customer network configuration, rate limiting after data exhaustion, and dish misalignment beyond the stated tolerances.

That last point is the one that decides whether the SLA is worth anything at your site. A partially obstructed install is not a slightly worse service with the same contract. It is a service with no contractual remedy.

Set against that, Starlink’s Australian Terms of Service state that use of the services is at your sole risk and that the services are “not suited or intended as a mission-critical or safety-of-life service”, with aggregate liability capped at the total amount paid over the preceding six months and consequential loss excluded. Australian Consumer Law guarantees are preserved and cannot be contracted out of, but do not plan your business around them.

Latency: fine for voice, workable for remote desktop, not the same as fibre

Starlink’s published Australian specification puts latency at 25 to 60 ms on land, and 100 ms or more in certain remote locations such as oceans, islands and high latitudes. Starlink’s Australian technology page contrasts this with geostationary satellite at around 600 ms or more, and nbn describes the latency inherent in its Sky Muster service as a consequence of the 72,000 km round trip.

For practical purposes:

• Voice. 25 to 60 ms one-way-ish latency is inside the range where a well-configured SIP call sounds normal. Jitter and packet loss during obstruction events, not latency, are what make calls sound bad on satellite. If voice matters at the site, read our note on VoIP over a satellite link alongside this.
• Remote desktop and published applications. Usable, but noticeably less crisp than a fibre link. Starlink publishes nothing at all about remote desktop performance, so treat any vendor claim about RDP over Starlink as unsupported. Test it with your actual application before you commit staff to it.
• Anything with a chatty, latency-sensitive protocol. Legacy line-of-business applications that do hundreds of small round trips per screen will feel every millisecond. Test, do not assume.

CGNAT is what actually breaks things

By default, Starlink assigns a CGNAT address in the 100.64.0.0/10 range. Starlink states plainly that the default IPv4 CGNAT policy does not allow inbound traffic.

The consequences, all published by Starlink:

• Port forwarding does not work. Starlink’s own routers do not support port forwarding or firewall rules for IPv4 or IPv6. To do it you need a third-party router and a public IP assigned, which means a priority plan.
• A public IPv4 is available on Local Priority and Global Priority only. There are no static IPs. Starlink operates a reservation system that retains the address across reboots, but states that relocating the unit or a software update may change it. If something depends on a fixed address, that is a risk you have to design around, not a feature you can rely on.
• IPv6 is native everywhere, on all routers, kit versions and plans, with a /56 prefix delegated to the LAN. On a modern network this is often the cleaner path.
• Some ports are blocked outright. Outbound TCP and UDP 25 (SMTP) and TCP 445 (SMB) are blocked, as are NetBIOS ports 135 to 139 in both directions.

VPNs: know which protocols survive

Starlink publishes a protocol compatibility matrix, and it is unusually specific. SSL-based VPNs traverse CGNAT best, and NAT traversal support is required.

• Client-to-site that works: SSTP, OpenVPN, WireGuard.
• Client-to-site that does not: PPTP, L2TP.
• Site-to-site that works: MPLS, IKEv2 with IPsec, OpenVPN.
• Site-to-site that does not: GRE, IPsec without NAT traversal, L2TP.

Starlink’s enterprise documentation is blunter still: protocols 47 (GRE), 50 (ESP), 51 (AH) and 115 (L2TP) are dropped by CGNAT. If your existing site-to-site design is a plain IPsec tunnel without NAT-T, or a GRE tunnel, it will not come up. Starlink also states it cannot troubleshoot VPN connection issues because they fall outside the scope of its network support, and that even with a public IP it cannot guarantee VPN compatibility. Plan your multi-site links accordingly, and prefer an SD-WAN or SSL-based overlay over legacy tunnels.

VoIP and video: Starlink names this problem itself

On Residential and Roam, the 1,200 concurrent session limit causes new sessions to drop the oldest ones. Starlink lists the symptoms in its own support article: VoIP calls dropping or failing to connect, one-way audio during phone or video calls, video meetings freezing, dropping or failing to join, and issues with gaming and VPNs. Its own recommendation is that customers who regularly use VoIP, video conferencing or other session-intensive applications should consider switching to a priority plan, because priority plans include a public IP and do not have the session limitations associated with CGNAT.

Read that as the vendor telling you the residential plan is not a business plan.

The same reasoning applies to remote camera access. If you want to view CCTV and access control from off site, either use a cloud-brokered platform that only makes outbound connections, or accept that you need a priority plan and a third-party router.

Obstructions are the whole ballgame in treed terrain

For business installations Starlink publishes a hard requirement: the dish must be 100 per cent unobstructed for best performance, with clear sky from roughly 20 degrees elevation across the full 360 degrees of azimuth. It states that even small obstructions have a negative impact, including intermittent outages, dropped packets or sessions, and a reduction in overall average bandwidth capacity. Do not install next to a wall or under cover.

Two practical notes for anyone on a treed block:

1. Use the app’s “Check for Obstructions” tool before you order. It is camera-guided, and Starlink recommends checking before purchase in heavily obstructed areas. A full obstruction map can take up to 12 hours to build, so do it over a working day, not over a coffee.
2. Field of view differs by hardware. The Performance kit has a 140 degree field of view against 110 degrees on the Standard kit, so it sees meaningfully more sky. If the site is marginal, the hardware choice is not cosmetic.

Where the sky is not clear, the answer is elevation: a pole, a mast, a tower, or a different corner of the property with a cable run back. Starlink’s own guidance is that if you cannot safely install the kit or clear obstructions, do not proceed and seek professional assistance.

Installation in Australia is a genuine gap

This one surprises people. Starlink runs a trained third-party installer programme, and the Australian partner is CIRCL. But Starlink states that third-party installers are available for Residential plans only, that customers outside the United States must contact their in-country installation partner directly, and that you are responsible for contracting with third-party installers yourself, with Starlink accepting no responsibility for pricing, contract terms, quality of work or damage to your property. Pole mount installations are excluded from the installer programme.

So the tier with the strictest obstruction requirement and an SLA that is voided by obstruction is also the tier with no vendor-provided installation path in Australia. If you are deploying priority Starlink at a business site, the mount, the cable route, the earthing, the surge protection and the alignment are your problem or your IT provider’s. Get it done by someone who does roof work properly, and then document it properly so the next person knows where the cable runs.

Data: read the fallback, not the headline

Starlink’s current structure is three classes of data: priority, residential and deprioritised.

• Residential Max and Residential get unlimited high-speed residential data, subject to network management if usage consistently exceeds what is allocated to a typical residential user. Starlink publishes no numeric threshold for that.
• Residential Lite gets unlimited data that is always deprioritised compared with other fixed plans.
• Priority plans buy fixed monthly Data Blocks of priority data. Unused data does not roll over. When the block is exhausted and you have not opted into Top-Up Data, Starlink states the service is limited to substantially slower speeds, giving up to 1 Mbps download and 0.5 Mbps upload as its example, for the remainder of the month.

That fallback is the part to design around. It is not a gentle deprioritisation to a slower but usable service. It is a rate limit that will take a site off the air for business purposes until the billing cycle rolls over.

Top-Up Data is opt-out by default, and auto-billing once you opt in. Starlink states that once you opt in you will be automatically billed for top-up data used until you opt out, including in following billing cycles. Decide deliberately which way you want that set, and put a usage alert in place either way. A site that burns through its block in week two is a site with a monitoring problem, not a Starlink problem.

Prices, block sizes and speed ranges move. Starlink publishes them on its Australian pages and in its Critical Information Summaries, and at the time of writing the CIS documents and the live pricing page do not agree with each other. Check both, on the day, before you budget.

The regulatory position, since people ask

Starlink Australia Pty Ltd holds carrier licence 542 on ACMA’s register of licensed carriers, granted in August 2020. The entity that contracts with you is different: Starlink Internet Services Pte. Ltd., a Singapore company with an Australian address in Sydney, operating as a carriage service provider.

Both entities are listed as active members of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman scheme, so you can escalate an unresolved complaint. Starlink publishes a statement of commitment to the Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code C628:2019, although that page has not been updated since April 2022.

ACMA has taken action against Starlink twice. In September 2023 it issued a direction to comply after Starlink breached the TCP Code by advertising a limited time offer with no end date. In May 2025 it issued a formal warning for four failures to lodge complaints records within 30 days, which incidentally confirms Starlink has passed the 30,000 services threshold in Australia. Treat that as a service maturity signal rather than a disqualifier, but do factor it into how you expect support escalations to go.

Where Starlink is genuinely the right answer

Sites with no viable fixed line or fixed wireless option. If nbn’s checker returns satellite, or returns Fixed Wireless and the install fails on signal strength, Starlink on a priority plan is usually a better service than nbn Sky Muster Plus Premium, particularly because nbn’s published shaping clause names VPN and streaming video as categories it may shape to 256 kbps. Check the nbn technology at the address first, because if fibre or a business grade fixed line service is available, that is the better primary.

Construction, temporary and project sites. A site office that exists for nine months, has no lead-in and needs to be productive next week is exactly the case Starlink was built for. There is no build cost, no lead time and no pit and pipe. Just check the sky.

Failover for a site that cannot use mobile. In the gullies of the Dandenong Ranges, mobile failover sometimes is not a real option because the mobile signal is worse than the fixed service it is meant to back up. Starlink on a priority plan, with its own protected power, on a separate router WAN port, is a legitimate second path. That combination is worth reading against what is actually available in the outer east and the Dandenong Ranges.

Remote depots, quarries, farms and field offices where the alternative is nothing.

Where it is not the right answer

• As a like-for-like replacement for a business grade fixed line at a site that has one available. You are trading a contracted fault restoration target for a 20 per cent credit and a vendor statement that the service is not intended for mission-critical use.
• Where you need reliable inbound access to on-premises systems and you are not willing to buy a priority plan, a third-party router and the design work to go with it.
• Where your site-to-site VPN is GRE or plain IPsec without NAT traversal. Redesign first, or it simply will not work.
• On a heavily treed block with no elevated mounting option. Partial obstruction does not give you a slightly degraded service. It gives you unpredictable session drops, and it voids the SLA.
• As the only link at a site with unreliable mains power, unless the dish, the router and the switch are all on a UPS. Unstable power is a listed SLA exclusion.

The pattern we see most often is a business that put a Residential dish on the roof two years ago, has been quietly in breach of the terms ever since, and is now blaming “satellite” for problems that are actually the 1,200 session limit and a tree.

If you have a site where the fixed options have run out, send us the address and we will check the nbn position, model the obstruction risk and tell you honestly whether Starlink is the right primary, the right failover, or the wrong answer. Call 1300 028 324 or use the form at techassist.au/contact.