Key takeaways
Enterprise IT budgets are under sustained pressure into 2026, and CFOs are increasingly asking why a remote site is paying for a high cost leased line when Starlink Business plus a managed connectivity layer can deliver the same outcome.
The headline line rental is only part of the picture. Install fees, on site engineering visits, secondary connections and the cost of avoidable downtime all sit underneath, and they add up quickly across an estate.
A worked 36 month comparison across a typical remote site shows the modern stack landing materially cheaper than the traditional one, while improving resilience. Your own numbers will vary, but the model is consistent.
The conversation playing out in finance and IT meetings across 2026 is a familiar one. The CFO has noticed that the remote sites line on the connectivity budget is large, slow growing, and oddly resistant to scrutiny. The IT director has noticed that engineers are still being dispatched to remote locations to power cycle a router or check a SIM. The COO has noticed that downtime at remote sites still happens too often. Three different roles, all arriving at the same question: is this the right architecture for 2026?
This piece walks through where the money actually goes on a typical remote site, what changes when you move to a modern stack, and a worked 36 month comparison you can use to model your own estate.
The Traditional Model: Where the Money Actually Goes
On a typical remote site running the traditional enterprise model, the cost stack usually looks something like this. A primary leased line, often fibre or bonded DSL, with a monthly rental in the £450 to £800 range depending on bandwidth and location. A one off install fee, typically £1,000 to £3,000, that nobody remembers a few years later but still appeared on the original CAPEX request. A backup connection, often a 4G router with a SIM, that sits unused for most of the year. A managed router or firewall on site, with its own annual support contract. And running through all of it, a steady drip of on site engineering visits, typically two to four per year, each costing several hundred pounds in engineer time, vehicles and lost productivity.
None of these are unreasonable on their own. Stacked together, across an estate of dozens or hundreds of sites, they add up to a number that surprises CFOs the first time they actually see it.
The Modern Model: What Changes
The modern stack does not eliminate any of these categories, but it shifts the balance. Starlink Business or a similar low earth orbit service replaces the leased line at a significantly lower monthly cost for comparable usable bandwidth at most remote sites. A 4G or 5G failover SIM sits behind the same connectivity device rather than in its own router. A single managed device, the i-ctrl in our case, replaces the separate router, firewall and failover hardware. Remote diagnostics through the customer portal cuts the number of on site visits required, because most issues can now be identified and often resolved without an engineer leaving the office.
The other significant change is on the avoided cost side. A site with proper failover that switches in seconds avoids the downtime that, on a traditional setup, becomes either an SLA breach, a missed alarm or an operational outage. These costs are often invisible on the connectivity budget, because they land elsewhere in the business. They are no less real for that.
A Worked 36 Month Comparison
The table below shows an illustrative comparison for a single remote site over 36 months. The numbers are realistic ranges for the UK in 2026 and are designed to be easy to adjust to your own estate. If you operate in continental Europe, Ireland or North America the proportions remain similar even where the absolute figures shift.
| Cost category | Traditional model | Modern model with i-ctrl |
|---|---|---|
| Primary connection install | £1,500 one off | £0 |
| Primary connection rental (36 months) | £600 per month, total £21,600 | Starlink Business at £138 per month, total £4,968 |
| Primary connection hardware | Included in install | Starlink terminal, £450 one off |
| Connectivity device on site | Router and separate firewall, £600 one off | i-ctrl, £750 one off |
| Connectivity SaaS layer (36 months) | None | £35 per month, total £1,260 |
| Failover connection (36 months) | £30 per month, total £1,080 | £15 per month SIM, total £540 |
| On site engineering visits over 3 years | 3 visits per year at £400, total £3,600 | 1 visit per year at £400, total £1,200 |
| Total over 36 months | £28,380 | £9,168 |
On these figures, the modern stack lands at roughly one third of the traditional stack over 36 months. Across an estate of fifty similar sites, the total saving sits in the region of £960,000 over the same period. The exact number for your estate will depend on the mix of sites, the bandwidth profile, and the local pricing for leased lines, but the shape of the comparison holds.
It is worth being honest about where the traditional model still wins. Sites that need genuinely high committed bandwidth, twenty four seven hard SLAs with financial penalties, or dense urban locations with cheap competitive fibre can still favour a leased line. The point of the comparison is not that one is always better. It is that the assumption should now be tested rather than inherited.
Where Netcelero Fits
The i-ctrl is the piece that makes the modern stack work as a managed service rather than a collection of consumer parts. It gives the site a fixed public IP regardless of which underlying connection is currently active, so ARCs, SOCs and head office systems always reach the same address. It handles automatic failover and failback between Starlink, cellular and any fixed line in seconds. It exposes diagnostics through the customer portal so the IT team can resolve most issues without dispatching an engineer. And it sits behind our own EU based infrastructure rather than a third party platform.
For Starlink Business specifically, our partnership with Brdy Telecom means the combined package can be procured cleanly through a single channel. For a wider comparison of the underlying technologies, our Starlink and 4G piece covers the trade offs in more depth.
What to Do This Week
If the comparison above prompts a conversation in your own finance or IT team, three quick steps will turn it into a defensible number.
First, pick five sites that represent the bulk of your remote estate by cost, and pull the actual figures for each. Most of the data is already in your accounts payable and your supplier invoices.
Second, model the modern stack against those five sites using the categories above. Even a half day of finance time will produce a credible number.
Third, run a pilot at one site before extrapolating across the estate. The pilot will surface the operational realities (engineer training, supplier transitions, customer communications) that the spreadsheet cannot.
The connectivity layer for remote sites was a settled topic for fifteen years. It is not a settled topic any more. The companies that revisit it deliberately in 2026, with real numbers and a pilot to back them up, will be the ones running cheaper, more resilient estates by the end of the year.
Contact us today if you would like a TCO model template tailored to your estate, or to talk through what a single site pilot would look like.
