I'm not sure how much of this will carry over to you since my experience is VSAT on cruise ships. All our ships are on KU band instead of the BUD's because of the size of the ships. We've spent a lot of time talking to a lot of different providers and in the end, you get what you pay for.
Our ships have between 128Kbps and 192Kbps. You can burst double that for a maximum of four hours a day. We have phones onboard with VOIP and it works fine. The satellite dishes (raydomes) cost about $60,000 because they are for marine use, have GPS in them and track the satellite as the ship moves. On top of that, we pay anywhere between $3000 to $5500 a month per ship for that dedicated bandwidth.
Are their cheaper options? Yes but the bandwidth is not dedicated. We get enough complaints about speed from our guests and crew that we wouldn't think about going to a shared connection and VOIP works very well over our connection.
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I'm not sure how much of this will carry over to you since my experience is VSAT on cruise ships. All our ships are on KU band instead of the BUD's because of the size of the ships. We've spent a lot of time talking to a lot of different providers and in the end, you get what you pay for. Our ships have between 128Kbps and 192Kbps. You can burst double that for a maximum of four hours a day. We have phones onboard with VOIP and it works fine. The satellite dishes (raydomes) cost about $60,000 because they are for marine use, have GPS in them and track the satellite as the ship moves. On top of that, we pay anywhere between $3000 to $5500 a month per ship for that dedicated bandwidth. Are their cheaper options? Yes but the bandwidth is not dedicated. We get enough complaints about speed from our guests and crew that we wouldn't think about going to a shared connection and VOIP works very well over our connection.