Good afternoon,
I am a project manager for an electrical contractor here in British Columbia, Canada and I have been in talks with a security firm to determine whether Starlink would be suitable for our Tourism project that we have taken on. Basically we are hoping to utilize Starlink to provide network access for a tourism kiosk booth in the middle of no where (zero cell service and abysmally slow local area network contractors) The Starlink system would provide two way network connectivity to a couple of systems. The first system is a user public interface (help button, Wi-Fi access, display screen etc..) and the secondary system is the back end.. IP camera support, remote system changes, heat detector, door switch alarms etc.. the engineers on this project have the following questions to determine if this system will work for us. Sorry for the long post.. See below..
Inbound access (client VPN) requires a publicly routable IPv4 address to be assigned to the Meraki MX WAN port. My understanding is that Starlink offers this with their Business Plans but would be good to confirm with them.
You may need to purchase an Ethernet adapter. Supposedly the default Starlink hardware kit is Wi-Fi only?
Need to confirm with Starlink that whatever customer premise equipment they are sending for this service can be set to ‘bypass mode’ (basically reiterating my first point around static public addresses) It appears the equipment can be set to bypass in the technical FAQ
Research suggests that Starlink has a…unique way of getting access to it’s Satellite stats which requires a direct (non NAT’ed) connection to a private IP range (192.168.100.1?) listening on the Starlink customer premise equipment. This seems to not be easily configurable with Meraki however there are a couple workaround options (unverified) to consider:
Stick a small unmanaged switch between the Meraki and Starlink, which would allow a PC to be connected as well in an as-needed/ad-hoc situation if access to these stats is required.
Stick a small unmanaged switch between the Meraki and Starlink, setup an additional LAN VLAN (192.168.100.0/24) on the Meraki MX and loop it into the unmanaged switch. This would allow (in theory) the satellite stats to be viewable from an inside host, and perhaps even a VPN user.
It’s possible that access to these statistics is rare/unnecessary post-implementation and a non-issue. But best to raise now just in case.
While Starlink is supposed to be lower latency and higher bandwidth compared to traditional satellite providers, I cannot speak to the reliability of the service. Please ensure that the bandwidth offered by the Starlink service meets your intent for this location. Specs online suggest 10-40mbps upload speed
Any information that you guys could provide would be invaluable as the direct networking support of Starlink itself seems non-existent. Have a great day!
Mike S.
