Satellite Connectivity Is Changing What’s Possible on Construction Job Sites
Based on a conversation with ChaChi Gallo, Vice President of Information Technology at Michels Corporation
For most industries, connectivity is a given. A building has infrastructure. A campus has a network. A distribution center has hardwired backbone with wireless layered on top. The question is never whether the connection exists — only how to optimize it.
Construction does not work that way.
When There Is Nothing Out There
ChaChi Gallo describes a condition that most IT leaders have never had to plan around: job sites where there is no carrier coverage, no cellular signal, and no fixed infrastructure of any kind. Not because the area is remote in the recreational sense, but because the infrastructure has not been built yet — and Michels is the company building it.
“In some cases, there is literally nothing out there, not even cellular, because we are building the network that is bringing it out to that area.”
That constraint reframes the entire connectivity problem. You cannot design a network strategy around carrier failover if there is no carrier. You cannot rely on a backup path if no primary path exists. The job site is not underserved. It is unserved, and the crew still needs to move data every single day.
What Satellite Actually Changed
Starlink shifted what is operationally possible at the edge. Before satellite became a viable option, Michels crews in remote locations were driving fifteen miles to their hotel at the end of a shift just to upload the day’s data. That is not a minor inconvenience — it is a hidden productivity tax that compounds across every crew, every site, every day.
Satellite eliminated that friction. Data that previously required a round trip off-site can now move from the job site directly. Drone footage, equipment logs, progress documentation, daily reporting — the workflows that depend on reliable data transfer no longer stall because the site lacks infrastructure.
ChaChi is clear that construction connectivity requirements differ from manufacturing or distribution. The design target is reliable daily throughput, not sub-second latency. Satellite meets that bar in environments where nothing else does.
The 5G Lesson from Amazon
Not every wireless technology lives up to its reputation, and ChaChi learned this firsthand. Under internal pressure to evaluate 5G as a replacement for Wi-Fi across job sites, he arranged a visit to an AWS distribution center to see what they had built.
The answer was not what the 5G advocates expected. Amazon runs Wi-Fi as the primary network inside its facilities. 5G serves as a tertiary connection — the backup to the backup — used only for backhaul. And even at Amazon’s scale, the hardware compatibility barrier was significant: any device without a 5G card required replacement before the technology could be adopted.
“We do not use 5G in the facility. We only use Wi-Fi. We only use 5G for the backhaul. That is our tertiary connection. So, that is not even our backup’s backup. It is our third option if we need it.”
For construction teams navigating the same internal debate, that lesson translates directly. Technology adoption should follow workload requirements, not vendor momentum.
Designing for What Construction Actually Needs
The practical framework ChaChi applies to connectivity mirrors the broader philosophy he brings to IT: sequence the investment to match the real operational requirement, and resist the pull toward solutions that are more sophisticated than the problem demands.
For remote job sites, that means satellite as the baseline enabler in areas without carrier coverage, wireless as a resilience layer, edge technology to buffer and hold data until a reliable transfer window opens, and honest assessment of what each layer can and cannot guarantee.
“If you want it reliable and consistent, it has to be hardwired. You cannot get that with Wi-Fi.”
That is not a dismissal of wireless — it is precision about where wireless belongs in the stack. Leaders who design around what is actually true about each technology will build more durable infrastructure than those who design around what each technology promises.
The Longer View
Every five to ten years, something new fundamentally changes what connectivity can deliver. ChaChi sees satellite as the current inflection — the technology that closes the gap for distributed field operations the way previous generations of wireless closed the gap for urban and suburban environments.
For construction IT leaders, the question is not whether satellite connectivity belongs in the stack. It already does. The question is how to design around it intelligently — layering it with the right edge strategy, the right data transfer architecture, and the honest understanding that reliable daily data movement, not real-time everything, is what most construction workflows actually need.
- Satellite connectivity is now a viable baseline for construction sites with no carrier coverage
- 5G serves as a tertiary backup even in the most advanced logistics environments — not a primary network
- Construction workflows need reliable daily data transfer, not sub-second latency
- Hardware compatibility is a real adoption barrier for 5G that often gets overlooked in vendor conversations
- Designing wireless strategy around actual workload requirements produces more durable infrastructure than chasing the latest standard