Starlink’s low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite network has revolutionized internet access for off-grid and rural areas. Its promise of broadband-class connectivity almost anywhere on Earth has attracted interest from industries that depend on reliable communications in remote regions — including Bitcoin mining. Yet while Starlink enables miners to establish operations far from traditional fiber routes, its current architecture presents critical limitations that must be understood before deploying it as the sole connectivity method for a mining site.
Connectivity Needs of a Mining Farm
Bitcoin miners do not require high bandwidth; even large farms transmit only a few megabytes of share data per day. What they do require is low latency, continuous uptime, and predictable network behavior for thousands of outbound TCP connections. Traditional broadband or microwave links usually meet these requirements. In remote regions, however, Starlink’s accessibility makes it appealing despite potential reliability trade-offs.
How Starlink Helps Remote Miners
Starlink offers rapid deployment, broad coverage, moderate latency (40–70 ms), and ample throughput (50–200 Mbps per dish). These traits make it valuable for temporary or backup connectivity at remote mining sites, particularly before permanent fiber links become available. In some instances this might be good enough for primary connectivity.
The Limitations of a Single Starlink Dish
Network Contention and Speed Variability: Throughput and latency fluctuate with satellite hand-offs or congestion. This variability can cause stale or rejected shares, reducing effective hashrate.
Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT): Starlink assigns private IPs behind CGNAT, preventing inbound connections and limiting scalability for thousands of miners without a local proxy.*
Uptime and Environmental Constraints: Weather events can interrupt connectivity for seconds to minutes, resulting in measurable share loss. Redundant links are needed for high availability.
Scaling Beyond One Dish: Each dish comfortably supports around 200–250 concurrent sessions. Large farms require multiple terminals, increasing cost and complexity.
Hex sector constraints: Multiple dishes located within the same vicinity will communicate with the same, single satellite as it is passing overhead; this limits the total bandwidth and redundancy possibilities.
Hex sector constraints: Multiple dishes located within the same vicinity will communicate with the same, single satellite as it is passing overhead; this limits the total bandwidth and redundancy possibilities.
Single IP per Dish: Each Dish/terminal is limited to a single IP address. This creates issues when using PAT for large number of miners. The more pools each miner maintains a connection with, the less miners can be serviced by a single dish. This complicates large sites and failover scenarios.
*Starlink offers public IP’s that bypass CGNAT for an added cost
Best Practices for Using Starlink in Mining
To mitigate Starlink’s limitations:
▪ Use multiple dishes with static load balancing and failover.
▪ Run a local Stratum proxy to reduce CGNAT session load.
▪ Maintain secondary WAN links (microwave, LTE, or fiber).
▪ Monitor latency and stale-share rates continuously.
▪ Engineer redundant power and network failover.
▪ Dynamic load balancing is not recommended
▪ Failover strategies should have longer hold down timers to prevent flapping and local network storms.
Conclusion
Starlink enables Bitcoin mining in remote areas by providing connectivity where no other broadband exists. However, its shared bandwidth, CGNAT limitations, weather sensitivity, and scalability ceiling make a single dish insufficient for large- scale, high-availability mining operations. Starlink is best used as part of a hybrid connectivity strategy — excellent as a backup or bridging link, but not a perfect stand-alone solution.
