Fiber, cable, or Starlink: what to hardwire and when satellite is the right call

People ask this as a technology question and it is not one. Fiber is better than satellite on every measure that matters, and saying so is easy. The useful question is the one underneath: what is at your road, and what is over your roof? Answer those two and the decision usually makes itself, because most of the time you do not actually have a choice between the two. You have one option, one option with a catch, or neither.

We should say where we stand. JWSR builds fiber plant for internet providers, close to 5,000 service drops and more than 470,000 feet of conduit placed. We also dig the trench when a satellite dish has to go out in a field because the house sits under trees. We get paid either way, so we have no reason to talk you into one. What follows is the way we actually think about it when a homeowner asks on site.

The two questions, in order

Ask them in this order, because the first one settles most properties before the second one matters.

Why hardwired wins whenever it is genuinely available

A buried wire is not weather. That is the whole argument, and it is a bigger deal in Sussex and Warren Counties than it sounds. A dish is a device outdoors with a view of the sky that snow sits on, that ice loads, and that a summer canopy grows into. A fiber drop in conduit is a piece of glass in a pipe in the ground, and the ground does very little.

The capacity difference is real too, but honestly, for a household streaming and working from home the weather answer is the one you feel. The day you notice the difference is not the day you run a speed test. It is the second week of February.

So if there is a wire at your road, the decision is made. What is worth asking is the boring administrative question almost nobody asks: how far past the road will the provider bring it for free, and what happens after that. On a 60 foot suburban frontage this never comes up. On a 400 foot gravel driveway it is the entire conversation, and it is better to have it before you have signed anything.

Why satellite is a real answer here and not a consolation prize

It is easy to be snobbish about satellite from a town with cable. Northwest New Jersey is not that place. 5,477 locations in Sussex County are unserved and another 3,177 are underserved, according to the New Jersey Office of Broadband Connectivity working from the FCC National Broadband Map. That is not a rounding error, and for those households satellite is not the worse of two options, it is the only one that exists this year.

Low orbit satellite is also genuinely different from the geostationary satellite internet people remember and resent. The old services put the satellite so far away that the delay was unavoidable physics and video calls were miserable. The current generation orbits far closer, and while it still loses to fiber, it lost the specific problem that made the old product unusable.

The catch nobody mentions: the dish faces north

This is the single most common surprise, and it is the reason so many satellite jobs turn into excavation jobs.

Every dish anyone in this country has ever owned pointed south, at satellites parked over the equator. Starlink does not. Its satellites orbit in a shell inclined around 53 degrees, so from our latitude the busy part of the sky is to the north, generally north northwest or north northeast. Two things follow. The old satellite TV mount on the south face of your roof tells you nothing. And the tree line that decides whether this works is the one on the north side, which is the one nobody has ever had a reason to think about.

Test it before you buy anything, and test it from the actual spot you are considering rather than from the driveway. If you can, test in summer. Bare February branches block far less sky than the same branches in June, and a dish that worked all winter and started dropping out at the end of May is one of the most predictable disappointments in this whole subject.

When it becomes a dig, and what that costs

If the house has no clear northern sky but somewhere on the property does, the dish goes on a pole out there and the cable has to get back. That is a footing and a trench, and it is bounded by a hard number: the longest cable the manufacturer sells for the standard dish is 45 meters, about 147 feet. Measure the real path, not the distance across the lawn, because the climb out of the house, the depth of the trench and the height of the pole eat twenty to thirty feet before the cable crosses any ground at all.

The cable is not rated for direct burial, so it goes in conduit. We run telecom conduit at about 18 inches, shallower in rocky ground where chasing depth would mean breaking ledge for a data cable. Nothing here cares about the frost line the way a water service does, where New Jersey requires 42 inches of cover so the pipe cannot freeze. A data cable does not freeze. Depth is about shovels, tillers and future fence posts. The full detail is on burying Starlink cable.

And the trench is a real trench, subject to real rules. A homeowner counts as an excavator under New Jersey's One Call rules, so the free 811 markout applies to your own yard, 3 to 10 business days ahead. The route from the house out to open ground is the same corridor the gas, electric, water and septic already use, because they all run out from the same building.

Why nobody will run you 1,500 feet of fiber for $29 a month

Who pays for a long drop varies, and there is no industry rule. Some providers cover the whole thing, some cover none of it, and some meet you in the middle. That is true of gas and electric as much as telecom. What does not vary is the arithmetic underneath the decision, and once you have seen it the answer stops feeling arbitrary.

Direct bury telecom runs $1 to $5 a foot in our work. So a 1,500 foot drop is somewhere between $1,500 and $7,500 of construction before anybody has been paid to maintain the line, answer your phone call, or provide any bandwidth. Against a $29 a month subscription, which is $348 a year, that is four years at the cheap end and more than twenty at the expensive end just to recover the digging. A long rural drop with rock, a road crossing or a stream is not landing at the cheap end.

That is the whole story. It is not that the provider does not want you. It is that a residential subscription cannot carry the construction, and no amount of being a good customer changes the multiplication. Knowing this is genuinely useful, because it tells you what to ask for. Do not argue that you deserve service. Ask what the contribution in aid of construction would be, ask whether neighbors on the same road can share it, and ask whether the road is in a funded build area, which is the one thing that changes the math.

The one thing that does change the math

Public money. And the way it works in New Jersey changed in 2025, in a direction most articles on this subject have not caught up with.

The federal BEAD program does not set a percentage of rural customers that providers have to hit. The obligation is location based: the state's stated goal is 100 percent coverage of unserved locations, not a share of them. So there is no quota to satisfy and then stop.

What changed is the rest of it. BEAD originally ranked technologies, with end to end fiber as the priority and satellite as a last resort reachable only where costs cleared a defined ceiling. NTIA's Restructuring Policy Notice of June 6, 2025 rebuilt that. New Jersey ran a single application round under the new rules, and in its own Final Proposal the state says two things that matter to anyone at the end of a long driveway.

First, New Jersey did not establish an Extremely High Cost Per Location threshold at all. There is no published dollar line for this state. Instead the state simply rejected projects whose costs were excessive for a given area.

Second, the definition of a priority project became technology neutral. It now means any project delivering at least 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up, with latency at or under 100 milliseconds, that can scale over time, regardless of the technology used. The state says plainly that it did not categorically exclude any technology. Applicants were selected on the lowest cost per location, and only where competing bids landed within 15 percent of each other did speed, latency and technical capability break the tie.

That is a straight price competition, and satellite won some of it. Starlink was among the providers awarded New Jersey BEAD funding, roughly $1.79 million of it, alongside Comcast on fiber and hybrid coax and Brightspeed on fiber. Applicants were also allowed to propose carving out individual locations they considered excessively high cost or economically unviable for their technology, which is precisely the 1,500 foot driveway.

So the honest picture is not that satellite is what you settle for when fiber gives up on you. In New Jersey, satellite competed against fiber on equal footing, on price per location, and at some addresses it was the cheaper way to get someone connected. If that is your address, you are not making do. You are arriving at the same answer the state did.

The advice that survives whichever you pick

Put in conduit, not bare cable, and put a pull string in it.

This is the only thing on this page we would argue for regardless of what you choose today. The conduit outlives the technology. If satellite is your answer this year and the state's buildout reaches your road in four, that same conduit carries the fiber drop, and the second installation is an afternoon instead of another trench across your lawn. New Jersey has been allocated over $260 million in federal broadband money aimed squarely at the locations counted above, so for a lot of these addresses the wire is a question of when.

While a machine is already on site, an extra empty conduit in the same trench costs very little. It is the cheapest thing on any of these jobs and the one people are most glad they did.

Common questions

Is Starlink better than fiber? No, and nobody selling it seriously claims otherwise. Fiber is a piece of glass in a pipe in the ground and satellite is a device outdoors in the weather with a view of the sky that snow, ice and summer leaf growth can all interrupt. The reason to choose satellite is not that it is better, it is that at 5,477 unserved locations in Sussex County alone there is frequently nothing to choose from. If there is a wire at your road, take the wire.

Which direction does a Starlink dish face in New Jersey? North, which catches almost everybody out. The satellites sit in an orbital shell inclined around 53 degrees, so at our latitude the usable sky is to the north, usually north northwest or north northeast. Every other dish anyone has owned pointed south at the geostationary belt over the equator, so the existing mount on the south side of the roof is very likely useless, and the trees that now decide whether this works are the ones on the north side of the property.

How far can the dish be from the house? About 147 feet, which is the longest replacement cable sold for the standard dish, and that is 45 meters of cable rather than 147 feet of straight line across the yard. Subtract the run from the router to where the cable leaves the building, the depth of the trench, and the height of the pole, and a 147 foot cable often reaches something closer to 120 feet of actual ground distance. If the only clear sky is farther than that, the fix is usually moving the router nearer the exit point, not hunting for a longer cable.

Should I wait for fiber instead of getting satellite now? Find out where you actually sit before you decide, because "coming soon" has meant a decade in some of these towns. New Jersey has been allocated over $260 million in federal broadband funding directed at unserved and underserved locations, so for many addresses the wire is genuinely coming. The way to hedge is not to wait, it is to put conduit in the ground now with a pull string in it, use satellite in the meantime, and pull fiber through the same pipe when it reaches your road.

Who pays for a long driveway drop? It varies completely and there is no rule to appeal to. Some providers cover the whole run, some cover none of it, and some meet you partway, and the same is true of gas and electric. What is consistent is the arithmetic behind the answer. At $1 to $5 a foot for direct bury, a 1,500 foot drop is $1,500 to $7,500 of construction, and a $29 a month subscription brings in $348 a year, so recovering just the digging takes anywhere from four years to more than twenty. Ask what the contribution in aid of construction would be, ask whether neighbors on your road can share one build, and ask whether your road sits in a funded build area, because public money is the only thing that reliably changes that calculation.

Does BEAD require providers to serve a percentage of rural homes? No. The obligation is location based rather than a quota, and New Jersey's stated goal was 100 percent coverage of unserved locations. The bigger point is that the program was restructured by NTIA on June 6, 2025 and is no longer fiber first. New Jersey did not establish an Extremely High Cost Per Location threshold at all, and it redefined a priority project as any project delivering 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up and latency at or under 100 milliseconds that can scale over time, regardless of technology. The state selected on lowest cost per location, using speed and latency only to separate bids within 15 percent of each other. Starlink was among the providers awarded New Jersey BEAD funding under those rules.

Do I need to call 811 to bury a cable on my own property? Yes. A homeowner counts as an excavator under New Jersey's One Call rules, so the free markout applies to work on your own land, placed 3 to 10 business days before you dig. This matters more on this particular job than people expect, because the path from the house out to open sky is the same corridor the gas service, electric service, water line and septic field already occupy. Where a mark lands near your route, no machine may work within two feet of it until the line has been exposed by hand.

Can I just run the cable along the ground? It will work and it will not last. The cable is weatherproof and UV resistant, which is what it needs to run down a wall, but on the ground it gets caught by a mower, chewed, walked on, and dragged by snow removal. If the run is short and temporary, fine. If it crosses ground you maintain, it belongs in conduit, and once you are opening the ground anyway the marginal cost of doing it properly is small.

Still not sure how this applies to your property? That is what a free on-site estimate is for. Call 862-268-2510 or tell us what is going on, and we will give you a straight answer, including when the answer is that you do not need us.

Code and source references

• Unserved and underserved location counts for Sussex County, and the state broadband allocation, from the New Jersey Office of Broadband Connectivity county fact sheet, drawn from the FCC National Broadband Map.
• Cable lengths, the 15 meter kit cable and the 45 meter replacement, and the fact that the cable is not rated for direct burial, are SpaceX specifications for the standard dish. Confirm against your own hardware generation.
• Northern orientation follows from the roughly 53 degree inclination of the main Starlink orbital shell, which places the usable sky to the north at New Jersey's latitude.
• Markout obligations and the hand digging requirement are N.J.A.C. 14:2, with notice 3 to 10 business days before excavation under 14:2-3.1(b) and no mechanized digging within two feet of a mark until the facility is exposed by hand under 14:2-3.3(a)1.
• The 42 inch water service cover figure, used here only for contrast, is the New Jersey amendment at N.J.A.C. 5:23-3.15. It does not apply to data cable.
• Burial depth of about 18 inches for telecom conduit, and the $1 to $5 per foot direct bury range, are our own figures from our own work, not published market rates.
• BEAD in New Jersey: the state's approved Final Proposal, published by the New Jersey Office of Broadband Connectivity, records that OBC did not establish an Extremely High Cost Per Location, that priority project status was assessed regardless of the technology used, that no technology was categorically excluded, and that selection ran on lowest cost per broadband serviceable location with speed, latency and technical capability applied only to bids within 15 percent of each other. The rules changed under NTIA's BEAD Restructuring Policy Notice of June 6, 2025.
• Award amounts by provider are as published in trade listings of the Benefit of the Bargain round and were provisional at the time of writing. Confirm current figures with the Office of Broadband Connectivity before relying on them.
• This is general information about how these decisions usually go, not a ruling on your property. What is at your road and what is over your roof are specific to your address.