Comcast Business is trying a new way to reach customers aside from through its cables, collaborating with the Starlink satellite-Internet service from SpaceX.

Comcast currently reaches 118 New Hampshire communities in much of southern New Hampshire and the Lakes Region. Starlink, which provides connectivity through thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, says it is available in all of New Hampshire.

Starlink usually requires customers to order and install equipment themselves, including the antenna. Under the arrangement announced last week, a Comcast Business spokesperson said the company will deliver, install and manage the Starlink equipment as part of its overall offering.

Comcast Business says the arrangement will be valuable for companies that have multiple locations with different levels of connectivity and also can provide redundancy and backup. It is the first major network provider to collaborate with Starlink.

Starlink was started in 2019 by SpaceX, the private aerospace company, using small satellites launched in groups of 60 or more at a time. They orbit at a relatively low 340 miles above the Earth. This allows them to provide connectivity with little delay but means any given satellite is only overhead for a short time; the innovation in Starlink is the ability to easily move connections from satellite to satellite, similar to the way cellphone calls made in a moving car have to shift from one tower to another without breaking the call.

The satellites, which number more than 6,000 at the moment, can sometimes be seen at night, with a half-dozen or more moving in a line across the sky. This ubiquity has drawn complaints from astronomers, who say that the flood of Starlink satellites is making it difficult to study or appreciate the night sky.