Chris Ortbals is Chief Product Officer (CPO) at IT expense management firm Tangoe, leading technology strategy, R&D and engineering.
Satellite connectivity has moved from a specialty purchase to standard enterprise tool in just a few years. While the technology matured quickly, the operational and financial infrastructure for managing it largely did not.
A global energy services company started deploying Starlink to keep field technicians, inspectors and project supervisors connected at remote job sites where traditional networks were unavailable or unreliable. The initial rollout worked well and requests quickly spread across operating regions. Within months, dozens of workers relied on portable Starlink kits for daily operations, safety reporting, video collaboration and access to business-critical applications.
New requests were arriving by email, phone call and informal conversations with no standardized process for approvals, equipment ordering or device tracking. Services ran through a centralized corporate account, but costs could not be reliably assigned back to the business units, projects or field workers using them. As adoption expanded, both operational and financial management got more complex and unwieldy.
This example is not unusual for enterprises adopting satellite connectivity—and it is one worth getting ahead of before simple deployments become an unmanaged cost category.
Escape Velocity From GEO To LEO
For most of enterprise IT history, satellite connectivity was a specialty purchase. Geostationary (GEO) satellites sit roughly 22,200 miles above Earth, and the physics of that distance are unforgiving. Round-trip signal latency runs 600 milliseconds or more, making real-time applications impractical and limiting satellite to environments where no terrestrial alternative exists. The price reflected that limitation.
Low Earth orbit (LEO) changed that equation. LEO satellites operate between 210 and 355 miles above Earth, cutting latency to about 25 to 40 milliseconds, which is generally comparable to a decent broadband connection. Gartner projects global LEO end-user spending will reach $14.8 billion in 2026, up 24.5% from 2025. Spending by businesses in locations with limited or no terrestrial connectivity is projected to grow 40.2%.
The pattern is familiar. A certain technology crosses a performance and cost threshold, enterprises move quickly to adopt it and financial operations and governance take longer to catch up. I have mostly stopped being surprised by it, although the satellite version has moved faster than most.
What Goes Up Must Be Managed
What makes satellite different beyond the technology itself is the commercial model surrounding it. That is where many enterprises are underprepared, and where operational consequences often appear.
Inventory is the first place where things get complicated. Legacy satellite deployments were fixed, expensive and limited enough to track manually. LEO changes that. Portable terminals like Starlink Minis, vehicle-mounted equipment and devices with embedded satellite connectivity are designed to move. They cross cost centers, get reassigned between teams and end up in different locations with nobody keeping track of it. These are physical assets with deployment cycles, custody chains and end-of-life requirements. Those considerations were rarely part of the legacy satellite conversation.
Billing is another challenge. Early satellite pricing was expensive but relatively simple. Enterprises now face geographic surcharges that can run from $500 to $1,500 depending on location and network demand, data pooling across sites, priority and standard service tiers and overage charges when pooled allocations run dry. These are features of the pricing model, not billing anomalies. Treating satellite invoices like fixed monthly circuit charges will produce recurring reconciliation surprises.
Cost allocation can also be problematic. In hybrid networks, traffic moves across fiber, cellular and satellite based on routing decisions. Without deliberate allocation rules, costs do not map cleanly to departments, projects or locations. Satellite spend placed in a shared infrastructure bucket becomes spend nobody owns, which allows it to grow without scrutiny.
Bringing It Back Down To Earth
Enterprises have addressed similar issues across wireless carrier relationships, SD-WAN deployments and mobile device fleets for years. The problem is that satellite often remains outside those management frameworks, handled by a separate team, in a different country or through a separate system.
Enterprises managing satellite well tend to follow four best practices.
First, they treat satellite as a standard WAN access type and track it alongside circuits and mobile assets, rather than in a spreadsheet or carrier portal accessible to one person.
Second, they validate satellite invoices against contracts, usage patterns and inventory records before approving payment.
Third, they build cost allocation rules while their satellite footprints are still small, since retrofitting those rules across a large distributed environment is a much heavier lift.
Finally, they manage the terminals and other portable device hardware with the same lifecycle discipline applied to other physical assets. That means knowing where everything is, who has it and what happens when a site closes or a contract ends.
It’s also worth pointing out scale. Managing four terminals across two sites is a spreadsheet problem. Managing 40 terminals across 30 sites, with variable billing and mobile hardware continually changing hands, is not. DIY manual processes usually fail earlier than IT teams expect, and the right tools and controls are a lot easier to install before that threshold than after it.
Final Approach
Enterprises building satellite governance now, while deployments are still relatively contained, are making a modest bet today that can pay off considerably later on. Satellite’s commercial model is engineered for flexibility, with pricing that changes by geography and network load, pooled data across distributed sites and mobile hardware that moves around faster than most inventory systems can track.
While that flexibility is genuinely useful, it can be genuinely expensive to lose track of at scale. It’s also worth noting that another major LEO provider—Amazon—is set to enter the space this year, so expect to see different pricing models, ordering processes, service and contract terms. These will present even more challenges for procurement, finance and IT teams to sort out.
Addressing the management model early turns satellite into a controlled cost category in which spend is visible, allocable and defensible to your finance team. Trying to figure it out later creates a familiar technology sprawl problem where nobody can tell you what’s deployed, who approved it or why the bill went up.
