We get this question every week: should we go with fibre or with Starlink? The honest answer is that the comparison is rarely about the technology. It is about your location, your uptime requirements, and what you would pay if you went down for an afternoon. Here is how we think about it on every site survey.
When fibre wins
If you have fibre at the kerb, install fibre. The latency is half. The cost per Mbps is roughly a third of any satellite plan. Cable in the ground does not care about cloud cover. For a city office handling video calls all day, the choice is not close.
But fibre availability is not binary. We have seen fibre-to-the-building connections that ran along three subcontracted cables before reaching the customer, with predictable results when any joint loosens. Ask not just whether fibre is available — ask who actually owns and maintains the line from the exchange to your demarcation point.
When satellite wins
Outside city centres, satellite often is not the second choice — it is the only choice. Modern low-earth-orbit services like Starlink deliver 100 to 250 Mbps in places where fibre will not arrive in this decade. For project sites, remote operations, agricultural clients, and offices in newer commercial estates, satellite is frequently the most reliable option available.
It is also the right choice as a backup. Even where fibre is solid, a Starlink dish on the roof costs a few hundred thousand francs and gives you a second path that survives almost any local fault. We install many sites this way: fibre primary, satellite failover.
The hidden factors
Three things rarely make it into the comparison table but often decide the answer.
Power independence
Fibre depends on the powered equipment in the exchange and along the route. When the grid goes down, so do most fibre links — even if your office has its own UPS. A satellite link, with battery on your end only, can stay up through outages that take fibre offline.
Time to install
A new fibre run can take 6 to 12 weeks if it requires civil works. A satellite kit can be operational in 90 minutes. For project sites with short timelines, that gap matters more than peak speed.
Total cost of ownership
Headline pricing favours fibre in most months. But add in the cost of a redundant link, the cost of downtime when the only line goes out, and the cost of waiting weeks for a fibre installation — and a satellite-first approach often comes out comparable or cheaper over a three-year window.
How we would decide for you
We do not sell either technology. We design connectivity. The questions we ask are:
- ▪Where exactly is the site, and what fibre actually reaches it?
- ▪How many hours of downtime per year would actually cost you serious money?
- ▪How much of your work depends on uploads (video, backups) versus downloads?
- ▪What is your power situation and what would survive a grid outage?
The right answer falls out of those four questions more often than from any spec sheet comparison.
