Internet for Temporary Sites, Site Sheds and Pop-Ups

The short version

A site that will only exist for weeks or months needs internet that arrives fast, carries the work, and leaves with you. For most temporary sites in Australia that is a business 5G router with an external antenna, set up as a portable kit. Where 5G is weak, a satellite service such as Starlink fills the gap. A fixed NBN or fibre service suits a long project or a new office that is staying, and rarely a shed that moves every quarter.

The trap is buying a plan that cannot move. Some fixed 5G business plans lock the modem to the address where it was first set up, which is fine for an office and useless for a site fleet. Read the terms before you buy.

Which option suits which temporary site?

In regional areas, nbn fixed wireless can serve a longer project office at one address. It is ordered and installed like any other nbn service, so treat it as a fixed option rather than a portable one.

Construction site sheds and project offices

A site office usually needs email, plans and drawings from the cloud, a few video calls, cloud phones and sometimes site cameras. That is well within what a good 5G service carries for a small team.

What makes it work on a building site:

• An external antenna mounted high. A steel site shed is close to the worst place for indoor signal. An antenna on the roof or a mast, pointed at the tower, usually makes the difference.
• A business router you own, with its own SIM. It can take a different carrier’s SIM at the next site if coverage there is better.
• A data plan that is allowed to move. Check the plan terms for address restrictions. Telstra’s 5G Business Internet modem “only works at the business address where it’s first set up”, and its terms say speeds drop to 1.5 Mbps if the modem moves outside its area. Optus’s 5G service “must be used at the address provided”. Mobile broadband data plans in your own router are usually the better fit for a site that moves, but check each plan’s terms.
• Power you can rely on. Site power gets switched off, tripped and moved. Put the router, antenna power and Wi-Fi on a small UPS. Temporary switchboards on construction sites have their own electrical rules in Victoria, set out by Energy Safe Victoria, so leave the supply to the site electrician.
• Security. Lock the router in a cabinet, change default passwords and keep site cameras and staff devices on separate networks from any visitor or subcontractor Wi-Fi.

For larger projects needing a committed speed, carriers offer enterprise products. Telstra, for example, describes its Dynamic 5G as suiting “temporary sites with no fixed infrastructure”, with sites “connected within weeks without waiting for fibre installation”. It is only available in some areas and is installed by Telstra.

Site shed fleets: 5G at every site or NBN at every project?

For a fleet of sheds that moves every few months, 5G wins, and it is not close. A fixed service has to be ordered, connected and often contracted at each new address, then stays behind when the shed moves. nbn’s own wholesale targets for a standard fibre connection in urban areas run up to 14 business days, and that is before the retailer’s own process. nbn’s Business Fibre Zone offer of Enterprise Ethernet with no up-front build cost explicitly excludes temporary sites.

The model that survives quarterly relocations:

1. One standard kit per shed. Router, external antenna and mast bracket, cabling, a small UPS and a Wi-Fi access point, all labelled to that shed.
2. Portable data plans, ideally on one account so you can see usage per site.
3. A pre-move coverage check at the next site, on each carrier, so you know before the shed arrives whether to swap SIMs or bring a Starlink kit.
4. A cloud-managed router, so the office can see which sheds are online without anyone driving out.

Temporary communications fibre on larger sites

On big projects the problem is often not the internet connection but getting it to several sheds, a gatehouse and cameras around the hoarding. Bringing one good connection to the main site office and distributing it is usually cheaper than connecting each building.

Over short runs that means outdoor-rated fibre or Ethernet between sheds, installed so it survives a working site. Over open ground with line of sight, point-to-point wireless links avoid trenching altogether. Point-to-point wireless covers how those links work. In Australia, fixed cabling must be installed by a registered cabler, which applies on a site compound as much as in an office.

Where 5G is weak: satellite

Some sites have no usable mobile signal, even with an antenna. Low-orbit satellite now covers that gap well.

At the time of writing (October 2026), Starlink’s Australian Critical Information Summary for its Local Priority business plans lists data tiers from 50 GB for $108 a month to 2 TB for $906 a month, typical speeds of 40 to 220 Mbps download and 10 to 30 Mbps upload, and latency of 25 to 60 ms. It says the service “supports mobility”, has a one-month minimum term and no early termination fee, and a standard kit costs $549. Once a data tier is used up, speed drops to 1 Mbps download. Check the current summary before buying, because Starlink changes plans often.

Starlink needs a clear view of the sky, so mount the dish where cranes, buildings and trees will not block it as the site grows. For a site that depends on the connection, pair it with 5G where there is any signal, so the two can back each other up. Internet for regional and remote Victorian sites covers Starlink’s limits for business use in more depth.

Pop-up shops

A pop-up needs card payments working on the first morning and nothing left behind when it closes. Use a business 5G router on a month-to-month plan that is not tied to one address, tested for signal inside the space before you commit. Keep the POS and EFTPOS on their own network, separate from staff devices and any customer Wi-Fi, and ask your payment provider whether the terminals have their own mobile fallback. The retail store fit-out technology checklist covers the rest of a store’s setup.

Events and trade shows

Venue Wi-Fi at a busy expo is shared by every exhibitor and visitor, and a packed hall puts the mobile network under strain too. For a stand:

• Bring a portable 5G router with its own data plan, and test it early on the build day
• Ask the venue whether a wired service is available for anything critical, especially payments
• Keep demo screens and video off the connection payments rely on
• Carry a second SIM on a different carrier

For large outdoor events, carriers can bring in temporary capacity. Telstra offers Cells on Wheels and transportable event modules to boost mobile coverage and capacity for crowds. These improve the mobile network at the event, not your stand’s internet service, but they help everything that runs over it.

Our new office won’t have NBN for six weeks

This is the most common temporary site of all. Run the office on business 5G until the fixed service arrives, but set it up properly:

• Test signal inside the tenancy where the router will sit
• Use the business router that will run the permanent service, so cutover is a small change
• Size the data plan for the whole team, including cloud phones and video
• Check cloud phones and remote access work on it before staff arrive
• Keep the 5G service after the NBN lands, as the failover

Internet lead times for a new tenancy covers ordering the permanent service early enough, and communications in a new commercial build covers the case where building approvals are the hold-up.

Get a temporary site connected

Kookaburra Comms is carrier-neutral and does not sell SIMs. We check coverage at the site on each network, choose between 5G, Starlink and a fixed service, and supply and install the router, antenna, UPS and site Wi-Fi as a kit that can move to the next project. For a site fleet, we can standardise the kit and manage every shed from one console. Start with business internet and send us the site address, the number of people and how long you will be there.