Boat Internet Strategy & Implementation
One of the questions many new boat owners ask is “how do I get Internet on the boat”? Designing a network strategy for a boat is another of those tradeoff challenges, like nearly every decision a boat owner makes. What are your priorities? Easy? Flexible? Fast? Anywhere coverage? Cost? Power consumption?
In this article, I will discuss some of these tradeoffs and talk about a few concrete ways to design a network. We will cover four different options, in order of increasing complexity but increasing flexibility and speed.
Uplink Options
The choice all starts with uplink options, i.e. how a gateway device on your boat is connected to the Internet. Unlike your house, where you have fiber or cable to your front door, on your boat, it must be some kind of wireless. You have three options: WiFi, Cellular, and Satellite.
WiFi is available in most marinas today. In some cases, it is free. In our home marina, it is not. It is, in fact, quite expensive. It can run as much for a week as Starlink does for a month! It also is inconvenient because of how it is set up, using 50 or so separate networks rather than one. That makes it inconvenient. Furthermore, you have to connect each device you want to use to each marina WiFi network you encounter, one by one. Finally, WiFi tends to get very congested in large marinas. They usually just aren’t designed for the number of devices 500 boats may carry today.
You could also go with cellular. However, unless you use a cellular WiFi access point or hotspot (more on that later) you will only have access on devices that have a cellular modem. In addition, cellular service is not available in many of the places we like to go. However, in the right circumstances, cellular is the fastest option.
In addition, in a modern fiberglass or aluminum boat WiFi and Cellular suffer from signal loss. On our Ranger Tug R-43, I measured a 14 dBm signal drop between the top of the boat and the “wiring closet” inside the boat. That represents a 16x drop in signal power. It means that a cellular or WiFi uplink will be impaired. We’ve been in marinas where we have service on the dock, but none at all in the boat.
If you only want to connect your phone, cellular or WiFi as is may be just fine, but if you want a true Boat Network, relying on WiFi or Cellular requires a bit of extra equipment and planning. This means that the simplest option, and likely also the most reliable out of the box, is Satellite.
Option 1: Out-of-the-Box Starlink
The simplest, most versatile baseline.
By “Satellite” we mostly mean Starlink today. There are alternatives, but they are simply not cost effective or otherwise viable. Many use geostationary satellites, which are so far away that the latency created by the speed of light becomes a blocking factor. Starlink is Low Earth Orbit (LEO), reducing this latency. Eutelsat is also LEO, but unless you’re kitting out a superyacht, the $15,000 hardware cost and $1,500 monthly cost is probably not outweighed by the performance guarantees.
There are three options for Starlink:
Both the Starlink Mini and the 4X are designed for stationary use, but they do work above that speed, until they don’t. Your mileage may vary. They’re just not designed for it. The plan prices are the same regardless of equipment. Most people that have a Starlink on a boat that I have seen have either the Mini, a 4X, or a previous generation of the 4X. The entry cost and power draw of the High Performance is just too high for most people. We have the 4X on our boat.
Starlink Service is relatively reasonable. 100 GB is $55 per month. 300 GB is $80, and unlimited is $175. We found that 100 GB is enough for a few days of working and doing zoom calls on the boat, and about a week of home-style usage. You can also pause service for $5 per month for any month in which you do not use it. These rates are higher than your typical home Internet, but in the scheme of costs of a boat, they aren’t your primary cost.
Implementation
None of the other options are simpler than this. Put your dish somewhere on the outside of the boat where it has a clear signal, run the network cable into the boat, turn on your inverter or shore power, plug the Starlink power brick into a standard 120v outlet, and follow the directions in the box the dish came in. It will walk you through it.
For a more permanent mounting, you will want to run a Starlink cable from inside the boat through a marine cable deck seal, such as a Scanstrut, to someplace outside where you can permanently mount the dish. Some newer boats come pre-wired for Starlink. Ours did.
If you need to run this wire yourself, Starlink uses a weather-sealed variant of an RJ-45 network jack, but it does not use standard pin-outs. If you don’t know what that sentence means, or even if you do, you’ll be better off just buying a long starlink cable from your favorite online retailer and installing that, rather than try to build your own cable. A 100’ cable costs about $40 and they come in many lengths.
Pros:
Simple to Setup: Little to no custom wiring or electrical engineering required.
Simple To Use: Simple, fast speeds, and highly versatile.
Cons:
Power Hungry: Relatively high battery drain
Inverter Required: Requires the inverter to run while your off shore power
Single Point of Failure: No backup uplink
Location Limitations: No Internet when the boat is stored inside a covered slip or a boat house.
Chore to Set Up Unless Pre-Wired: Unless you permanently install the cabling and the dish, it becomes a chore to turn on the Starlink.
Subject to Congestion: Starlink can slow down when it is congested, such as in a large marina
Option 1a: Starlink 12v DC Conversion
The high-efficiency cruiser upgrade.
The standard Starlink setup draws its power from the house battery bank. However, between the battery and your web browser, it goes through several conversion steps. On the way to your Starlink router, DC power, usually 12 volts, sometimes 24 volts, leaves your batteries, goes to an inverter that converts it to alternating current (AC) and transforms it to 120 volts, and on to a standard household jack. It then goes from the household jack to the Starlink power brick, where it is rectified (converted) back to DC, and transformed to 57 volts. These conversions and transformations are highly inefficient.
Power Loss In Conversion
A Starlink 4X draws about 55 watts of power in steady state. The inverter has an idle draw of about 20w, just for being on. The inversion and rectification loses another 10-15% each. That means that to supply 55 watts to the dish you need to draw ~92 watts from the batteries to run Starlink on AC power.
If you could run Starlink directly on DC you would still need to transform the voltage from 12 volts to 57 volts, but that costs you ~10 percent overhead. All the other conversions would go away. That means the DC path uses ~60w total draw from the batteries.
In other words, you save 32 watts running Starlink on DC. 92w is ~7.5 amps at 12v (Ohm’s Law: volts*amps=watts), while 60w is ~5 amps . That means the conversion overhead running on 120v is about +2.5 amps. That is up to 60 Ah of overhead, per day!
This could be significant. Our house battery is 942 Ah. Let’s say that with Starlink, that battery pack lasts 3 days. That would be an average draw of 13 amps per hour. If we could reduce that by 2.5 amps per hour, we would gain nearly 18 hours of additional battery capacity! That’s enough for several lattes out of our Nespresso machine, which, after all, is more important than most things on the Internet. It turns out, doing this is not that difficult.
Installation & Hardware
To avoid this overhead, you need to replace the power supply that comes with your Starlink 4x with a DC power supply. Starlink sells two such options in the Starlink shop: a DC-DC power supply for $110, and a more flexible Advanced Power Supply that can do either DC or AC for $200. The latter also has a port to connect a third party router (see option 2 below).There are less expensive aftermarket options, such as this 12V to 57V DC-to-DC Step-Up Converter.
If you opt for the official Starlink one, you also need a way to connect the power supply to a fuse block (positive) and the negative bus on your boat. The Starlink power supply comes with an XT60 female connector, which does not connect to anything on your boat. You will either need to cut that off to expose the two wires within (Red is positive. Black is negative); or you need an XT60 male connector to plug into it. Regardless of which option you choose, you need to crimp some appropriate size ring connectors on the end of the wires (the ones that come with that XT60 connector are far too large to fit a standard marine fuse block). If you opt for an aftermarket power supply they usually just have bare wires so those also need ring connectors.
If your ring connectors are not already heat shrink connectors, you need separate heat shrink. You may need some additional 10 AWG wire to reach your fuse block and negative bus. If so, you also need some heat shrink butt connectors. If you are going to do this, buy a pack of assorted connectors and you will have everything you need. Finally, you need a 30 amp fuse, and an open slot to put it in and connect the wires to. It sounds more daunting than it really is.
I also really like the ability to turn the Starlink on and off. When you run it on the inverter, you can pretty easily unplug it, but that’s not so easy when it is hardwired to DC power. To solve that problem, I ordered a New Wire Marine 22mm Bluewater ON/OFF Stainless Switch that I installed on the positive wire side before the power supply. It is lighted, so it needs its own power, but since it draws so little, I just connected it to the same fuse block post the Starlink used. I also created a custom switch cover on New Wire Marine with the Starlink logo. You will also need a ⅞” or 22mm spade bit, or an electrician’s step drill bit, to drill the hole for the switch.
This is the option we went with on our boat. It looks good, works well, and is dead simple to use. Blue is the money saving mode (Starlink off) and Red means the Internet is Live (Starlink On).
We configured Starlink to use the same WiFi name and IP address range as our home network, so every device we bring onto the boat from home automatically just works.
Pros:
Most Power Efficient Option: Very power efficient
Simplicity: Simple to use and configure
Supports Most Scenarios: Typically sufficient for at least one video call, possibly two simultaneous ones
Cons:
Not As Easy To Set Up: Requires some electrical skill to wire. Adding a switch to turn it on and off adds complexity
Single Point of Failure: No cellular backup
Location Limitations: No Internet when the boat is stored inside a covered slip or a boat house
Subject to Congestion: Starlink can slow down when it is congested, such as in a large marina
Option 2: Cellular Backup
Best for: Users who prioritize maximum network speed
There are more advanced options if you have specialized needs. I’m not going to go into full detail on how to install these. I find them more complex and more expensive than most boaters will want to install and manage. However, there are advantages to them. The first option is to add a Cellular uplink to your Starlink setup, or to skip Starlink altogether and just go with Cellular.
While there are many WiFi routers with cellular backup, the problem with cellular is the signal loss inside the boat. The signal loss is great enough that any speed advantage 5G has over Starlink is easily lost. To use cellular you really need the modem outside the boat. This “modem-on-a-stick” approach puts your cellular hardware outside the boat, and the router inside the boat, with some kind of wire in between. There are several options.
Probably the most performant is using a Peplink router such as the BR1 Pro 5G ($1000) and a Maritime antenna ($650). However, those use coax cable to connect the two, which also has significant signal loss. For that reason, it’s not optimal.
There are few options for a cellular antenna and modem combination that uses a low-loss ethernet cable instead, such as a Unifi configuration using, for example, a Unifi 5G Max Outdoor Antenna connected to a Unifi Cloud Gateway Max inside the boat. This has two downsides, however. The first is the $678 price tag for the equipment, far higher than Starlink. Second, the bigger issue is that the antenna is directional. This means it needs to point in the direction of the nearest cell phone tower. Unfortunately, a boat at anchor is not directional, so you should expect to have to re-point the antenna periodically to maintain the strongest signal. It can, however, in many circumstances provide faster speeds than Starlink.
The service might be less expensive too, especially if, like me, you are a Google Fi customer and you get the cellular data-only service worldwide for free as part of your phone plan (use my referral code, 74P09P, for a discount if you want to switch carriers).
However, in my opinion, this setup is not worth the additional cost and complexity. The exception may be if you want to also use other compatible gear, such as the UniFi Protect PoE cameras. I may do that at a later date, but when I do, I will likely still just use the Starlink as my primary Internet backhaul.
Pros:
Cellular with Lower Signal Loss: Bypasses the fiberglass signal drop by running ethernet up to the modem on the mast
Flexible to Extend: Supports UniFi Protect PoE cameras with continuous, local recording on the UCG-Max
Cons:
Complexity and Cost: More complex to install and more costly than Starlink
Two Systems To Maintain: Requires managing two separate systems (Starlink and UniFi)
Option 3: The "Mast-Top Router"
Best for: Maximum flexibility.
If you really need the maximum possible speed, and/or you want the ability to use Marina WiFi as an uplink, you can have that with the most complex setup we will discuss.
This architecture is based around the Peplink BR1 Pro 5G router I mentioned earlier, but paired with the mast-top Antenna Max dome ($349). The Peplink router is mounted inside the antenna and gets power from a Power over Ethernet splitter ($99) installed inside the antenna. It, in turn, gets power from a PoE injector installed inside the boat. If you have Starlink, you need the same gear we discussed before. To maximize the value of this setup, you should use 12v power for all of the devices. It’s a complex setup and all of the equipment will cost you between $2,500 and $3,000, not including installation and cellular and Starlink service. You may need to spend an additional $400 or so on supplies, tools, and shrouds for your mast to support the relatively heavy antenna. Installation will take an accomplished technician 90 minutes to several hours, depending on the complexity of the particular installation.
Cellular service ranges from free with Google Fi, to $100 per month, depending on your plan and the carrier. The upside is you will likely be able to use the $55 Starlink plan since you’ll need it less, saving you $25-120 on Starlink, depending on which plan you would otherwise have.
As you may realize at this point, financial savings is not the reason you choose this option. Let’s say that were you to only use Starlink, you would use the unlimited Starlink plan for $175. If you install this more complex option, you could use the $55 Starlink plan, and in return, pay $50 per month for cellular data service. You would save 175-55=125-50=$75 per month. Your additional cost is approximately $2500. That means it would take you 33 months to be ahead financially. If you use the boat heavily four months per year, that’s more-years-than-you-want-to-know before you save money.
In addition, this option is complex. With Starlink, you spend 5 minutes setting it up once, and then it is automatic. With this option, once it is set up, you will have to manually connect the Peplink to each Marina WiFi you want to use the first time you see it. In addition, while the Peplink allows you to set a static priority order for the uplink, such as Marina WiFi, then Cellular, and last Starlink; in my experience, you need to relatively often manually change the uplink priority. Sometimes you’re not far enough from a cellular tower to not have a connection, but plenty far away that the connection is abysmally slow. Or, you are watching YouTube in a crowded marina with 2,500 other boats sharing a pokey WiFi network. When I used a Peplink, I had to manually connect to the router, accept the certificate error it presents every time I do so, and manually switch the priority order. Every. Single. Day.
In other words, this option only makes sense if you absolutely must have the higher speeds you get with optimal 5G cellular compared to Starlink. If you can do what you need using Starlink speeds, it makes far more financial sense to stick with that much simpler option. You should also keep in mind that while cellular can be faster than Starling, it isn't always faster. It all depends on how far you are from the towers. However, with this option, your likelihood of fast cellular speeds are maximized. You just may not always be able to get them, and when your antenna can't see a tower at all, you need to rely on Starlink again.
If you do want to go with this option, here is roughly how it will look.
Pros:
Best Cellular Signal: Zero cellular signal loss because the modem and antennas are integrated into a single topside unit.
Highest speeds: Starlink is relatively fast, but strong cellular connections are faster. If speed really matters to you, this is the option you want.
Marina WiFi Support: You can save data and, sometimes, money by using Marina WiFi where available
Cons:
Complexity: Very complex to set up. Requires many moving parts and custom configuration. In addition, the Peplink is designed for networking professionals. Even having spent decades deeply involved in networking I find it complex to use.
Cost: This is unquestionably the most expensive strategy. That is not why you use this option.
Power Draw: Unless you manually manage whether each component is on this setup will draw more power than a straight Starlink setup.
Router suboptimally placed: Since the router is on top of the mast, its internal WiFi coverage inside the heavy-fiberglass cabin may be affected. An additional interior Access Point (connected via a secondary mast run) may be required, especially on larger boats, further increasing the cost.
With Jesper's help, we installed the Starlink DC power supply and a much less nice-looking on/off switch that is inside the helm seat storage. We live on the boat full time for half the year and are making improvements to be able to stay out on the hook / ball / no-services dock for longer without having to run the generator (at all or at least not for more than 1-2 hours at a time). Including the power saved by not having the inverter on (since Starlink is often the only device using the inverter), we are seeing about a 3amp per hour savings. However, we could stay on the hook for 3 days without adding power before this conversion, and we would turn off Starlink overnight and when we left the boat (in kayak or dinghy) when actively conserving power, so at 2 days of 16 hours a day running Starlink and saving 3 amps per hour, that is about 96 amps, so 10% of our powerbank, which is definitely significant.
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