Context — why procurement matters
Recent high-profile outages and oversight reporting have underscored that reliance on a single commercial satellite provider carries operational and geopolitical risk. A multi-region outage disrupted Ukrainian communications and highlighted the need for contractual SLAs, incident reporting and redundancy planning for mission-critical deployments. (Source: Reuters).
Governance checklist for buyers & procurement teams
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Write clear SLAs & incident obligations. Contracts should demand vendor notification timelines, root cause analyses, and remediation commitments for outages.
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Mandate redundancy. Require at least one alternate path (satphone, alternative satcom vendor, or multi-SIM cellular) for critical missions.
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Define firmware & change control. Block uncoordinated remote firmware upgrades in critical windows; require signed change approvals for mission-critical devices.
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Inventory & chain-of-custody. Track device serials/activations and assign custodianship documented in procurement records.
Operational protocols (practical)
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Run regular disaster drills that simulate Starlink unavailability and test failover to cellular or satphone.
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Include recovery playbooks in runbooks: power-cycle sequences, local config restore and authorized re-activation procedures.
Selling angle for accessory vendors
If you sell power kits or enclosures, bundle a “procurement compliance pack” with serial number logging tools, tamper-evident tags, a one-page chain-of-custody log and a preloaded recovery USB — this resonates strongly with institutional buyers.
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