Managed service provider MetTel announced it added SpaceX’s Starlink satellite connectivity to its SD-WAN platform to meet what CTO Ed Fox said was “federal and commercial interest” across its customers – especially those with remote locations hard to reach with terrestrial connectivity options.

The MetTel service taps into VMware’s SD-WAN product, which Fox said is “great at utilizing two circuits to combine bandwidth and do the packet duplication and code error correction across both circuits.”

The satellite connection can be an addition to legacy terrestrial connections like 4G LTE, Fox explained, adding that in a majority of use cases where reliable links or 4G LTE is unavailable “the Starlink connection becomes the preferred connection.”

“We put in multiple LTE connections to back that up,” he added. “And that seemed to work very well.”

The Starlink connection relies on MetTel’s secure access service edge (SASE) and SD-WAN security overlay. “What we're sending over the Starlink median is already encrypted and not unencrypted until it reaches our network or a customer's data center or their cloud,” Fox said.

MetTel tested the Starlink’s compatibility with its SD-WAN service “extensively” and found the satellites provide lower latency than any other satellite providers the company had tested before, Fox told SDxCentral.

“Most of the satellite providers do some TCP manipulation to make the service look faster, which doesn't play well with SD-WAN products,” he noted. “But when we tested Starlink it was lights out, a great experience.”

Many satellite communication providers use packet manipulation like queuing to provide a better consumer experience, but when using a business-oriented overlay technology like SD-WAN the packet manipulation can inhibit the performance of the network, according to MetTel.

“Starlink’s low-earth orbit (LEO) system provides low latency, high-bandwidth transmissions without heavy processing of traditional satellite, enabling the MetTel Labs team to integrate space-based access paths into its existing terrestrial SD-WAN networks,” the company said in an announcement.

Fox said that as of now, MetTel customers can only procure the Starlink service through an approval process in which they submit a letter of authorization (LOA), and then the company orders it on their behalf and fills the order as “an expense management part of our business.”

However, MetTel hopes Starlink will soon make wholesale contracts available for the SD-WAN service.

“We still haven't been able to become a wholesale carrier of Starlink,” Fox said. “And we call once a week, but they're not giving wholesale contracts.”