Every significant economy has experienced the moment when a backhoe severs a fibre trunk, a subsea cable fault isolates a region, or a storm collapses the cellular grid — and corporate networks go dark. For enterprises operating critical national infrastructure, financial settlement systems or supply-chain logistics, even a two-hour outage can cascade into hundreds of millions in economic damage and systemic regulatory exposure. Terrestrial redundancy alone cannot cover simultaneous multi-path failures, and relying on a foreign commercial satellite operator introduces a dependency that can be withdrawn, throttled or priced arbitrarily at the worst possible moment.
A sovereign LEO Ka-band constellation of microsatellites — paired with VSAT terminals at corporate hub sites — delivers always-available backup links with latency low enough to sustain VPN tunnels, VoIP and lightweight ERP transactions. The constellation provides nationwide coverage on a near-continuous basis, and because the ground segment, spectrum licences and network operations centre all sit inside national jurisdiction, traffic is never routed through a foreign exchange point. Encryption is applied at the terminal before uplinking, and key management stays sovereign throughout.
The operational outcome is a guaranteed last-resort WAN path that activates automatically via BGP failover within seconds of a terrestrial outage being detected. National regulators gain the ability to mandate this capability for systemically important enterprises — banks, utilities, hospitals, logistics hubs — without depending on commercial availability or foreign goodwill. The same constellation capacity can be offered to government agencies as a shared national resilience asset, amortising the infrastructure cost across both public and private sectors.
Frequently asked
What is Corporate WAN Backup via satellite and who typically uses it?
It is a secondary wide-area network path that activates automatically when a company's primary terrestrial connection (fibre, MPLS, cellular) fails. Enterprises with distributed offices, retail chains, logistics operators, banks, and energy firms use it to maintain operations, protect revenue, and meet regulatory uptime obligations during outages.
Why should a government operate this capability rather than simply buying Starlink or Inmarsat commercially?
Foreign-operated constellations can be throttled, repriced, or denied at the discretion of their home-country government — events documented during geopolitical disputes. A sovereign constellation keeps the routing, encryption keys, and spectrum allocation under national control. The OECD estimates enterprises lose $300,000 per hour of downtime; a government that can guarantee WAN continuity for its national enterprises has a direct GDP-protection lever.
What orbit and satellite class makes sense for a WAN backup constellation?
LEO at 500–600 km altitude is the standard choice: latency drops to 20–40 ms (compared with 600+ ms on GEO), and constellation phasing ensures any ground terminal sees a satellite within 60–90 seconds. Microsatellites of 50–150 kg carrying Ka-band payloads offer the best balance of launch cost, capacity per satellite, and replacement cadence.
How does failover actually work in practice?
SD-WAN software on the customer premises equipment continuously monitors primary-link health metrics (latency, packet loss, jitter). When thresholds are breached, traffic is rerouted automatically through the satellite terminal — typically in under 60 seconds with modern equipment. The satellite link appears as just another underlay to the SD-WAN, so applications see no topology change.
How much bandwidth can a satellite WAN backup realistically deliver?
Current LEO services such as Starlink Business advertise peak download speeds of 220 Mbps per terminal, though shared-beam architectures mean real-world sustained throughput is lower — typically 50–100 Mbps in enterprise deployments. For backup purposes (email, VPN, VoIP, critical ERP transactions) this is more than sufficient; video-heavy workloads may need traffic prioritisation.
What cybersecurity risks are specific to satellite WAN links?
Satellite signals are broadcast and therefore theoretically interceptable, so payload encryption (IPsec or TLS 1.3 minimum) is non-negotiable. Ground segment infrastructure — teleports, Network Operations Centres — are high-value targets; NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 provides the baseline control set. Nations operating a sovereign constellation must also secure the command-and-control uplink against spoofing or jamming.
What does building a sovereign WAN backup constellation cost versus buying service?
A 20-satellite microsatellite constellation with national Ka-band coverage costs roughly $150–300M to design, build, and launch, with $20–40M per year in operations. Buying equivalent capacity from commercial providers at scale costs $30–80M per year without capital ownership, without control, and without the dual-use intelligence and resilience benefits a sovereign asset provides.
Are there international regulations governing satellite-based enterprise WAN services?
Yes. The ITU Radio Regulations govern spectrum use and interference protection (relevant filings under Article 9 and Appendix 4). ETSI EN 302 307-2 covers DVB-S2X framing widely used in VSAT uplinks. Nationally, operators must comply with each country's telecommunications licensing regime, which varies significantly across jurisdictions.