Starlink On A Sailboat 2025: Is It Possible To Use Starlink At Sea?
It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for – Starlink on a sailboat. While Starlink promises super-fast internet from anywhere in the world, it is yet to be confirmed whether it will be able to ‘roam’ on moving homes like sailboats and RVs.
The attraction of Starlink on a sailboat is that it should mean cruisers like us can work from literally anywhere in the world, have access to weather forecasts, and communicate with family and friends from the middle of an ocean.
Having unlimited, fast internet through Starlink on a sailboat would be an absolute game-changer. But is it up to the task yet? We’re finding out!
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Quick Menu
- What is Starlink?
- Can you move around with Starlink?
- Why use Starlink on a sailboat?
- How does Starlink compare with satellite phones?
- Does Starlink actually work on a sailboat?
- Our findings
What is Starlink?
In case this is the first time you’re hearing about it, Starlink is a project from controversial billionaire Elon Musk that aims to bring blazing-fast, unlimited, wireless internet to every last corner of the Earth.
Starlink uses a “constellation” of satellites orbiting around the planet to beam superfast internet down to essentially any location on Earth, provided it has a clear view of the sky – from the peak of Everest to the Pacific’s Point Nemo.
Eventually, there will be around 40,000 such satellites aloft, but at the time of writing there are about 1,500 in orbit, with more being launched almost every week.
Can Digital Nomads Move Around with Starlink?
The goal of the Starlink project is to blanket the entire Earth with ultra-fast internet. So, the short answer is “yes” – you absolutely can move around with Starlink and continue to enjoy blazing-fast, 150 – 200mbps internet wherever you go.
The longer answer is that at the time of writing (May 2022), you can get a strong Starlink signal anywhere in the USA, Europe, and New Zealand; right across the southern half of Australia, and in a handful of locations in the Caribbean, South and Central America (notably all of Chile and Brazil).
The rest of the world is coming in 2023, apart from Russia, China, Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan. Starlink has yet to announce whether it plans to cover those areas in the future.
You can see this all represented on a map here. Starlink already neatly “hands-off” your signal from one satellite to the next as they pass overhead in a steady procession, so there’s very little difference whether you’re moving, or the satellites are.
When Starlink first launched, the official line was that you actually couldn’t travel around with your dish – in fact, they threatened that if you did, it was “at your own risk that it might never reconnect” when you got home. But people did it anyway and reported that it works just fine.
The company’s response was to introduce an official roaming service for an additional $25 per month (meaning you pay $124 total per month instead of $99). Some users still report successfully roaming without even paying the fee, but that’s the official position as of now.
How fast can you move with Starlink and maintain a good signal? Well, the satellites themselves are moving overhead at about 7.5 kilometres (4.6 miles) per second. At that speed, they circumnavigate the globe once every 90 minutes or so.
If your sailboat can compete with that, you have to come and give us some lessons! The bottom line is you’re not going to be moving fast enough to lose sight of the constellation even if you’re in an aircraft.
If you’re wondering whether Starlink is any good for digital nomads, then the answer is yes! You will be able to travel with your internet with no extra roaming charges to almost anywhere in the world by 2023!
Why use Starlink on a Sailboat?
There are a thousand reasons to have a good internet connection on a sailboat, not least that knowledge is power and a good data connection gives you access to weather reports, marine traffic information, a line of communication with loved ones back ashore, communication with other vessels, the ability to Google the answer to any technical problems that crop up at sea, and of course, entertainment!
Even the best-in-class “traditional” satellite internet systems are slower than 1mbps and usually cap you well below 1GB of data per month. For context, one hour of HD video is about 1.5GB.
The fact that Starlink is unlimited and can hit speeds of 150 – 200mpbs (maxing out at 500mbps) is a game-changer. It’s faster than your home broadband or fibre connection, but you can use it almost anywhere in the world. Who doesn’t want that?
Sailing can be expensive. In fact, just staying alive is expensive, full stop. That means a lot of people now work remotely from their sailboats to fund their dreams – whether it’s creating YouTube videos or working a regular job from their floating home.
One of the few benefits of the COVID-19 pandemic was proving that 90% of jobs can be done from anywhere with an internet connection, and as a result, more people are working remotely than ever before – your authors included!
We’ve always relied on 4G (mobile data) hotspots, which do work very well – but require a little forward planning to ensure we’re somewhere with good shelter, holding, and phone reception every time we hunker down for a few days to work.
Starlink changes all that – we could be adrift in the mid-Atlantic, happily holding conference calls with our colleagues back at home. If you’re a “digital nomad”, or want to become one, it’s clear what a game-changer this could be.
There are obvious safety aspects, too. EPIRBs and PLBs already use satellites to communicate distress signals from any corner of the globe, but they don’t provide a great deal of context – simply, “mayday, we need to be rescued, and here’s our location”.
But is the boat on fire, or has it just lost its rudder? How much food do you have? How many souls aboard? Are you abandoning into the life raft or staying with the big boat?
Provided the Starlink dish survives whatever disaster befalls the boat (and that is quite a big if!) you could quite literally have a Zoom call with the rescue service professionals to debrief the situation and receive instructions in return – not to mention the huge morale boost that would accompany knowing help was at hand.
You could Google the answers to technical faults while mid-Pacific, or discuss routes and problems with your sailing peers and brainstorm the solution together.
Much of this is sort of possible in short text message format with existing solutions like the Garmin InReach, but as we’ve discussed elsewhere in this article, those systems are positively prehistoric in their speed and capability compared to Starlink.
On InReach, for example, you get 160 characters per message (20 – 25 words), 10 messages a month on the basic plan, and receiving a message counts against that total just the same as sending one. It’s not even really comparable.
And then there’s entertainment! It’s never been more popular to sail around the world with your family in tow, but what do you do to keep the kids occupied on a three-week offshore passage?
Sailing purists will say you watch the sun and the waves and settle into the rhythm of the boat like our ancestors did for thousands of years before us.
But if you’re a parent and you try to tell me you’ve never thrown your bambinos an iPad for a few minutes of peace, I’m not sure I believe you.
Sure, you can carry around a hard drive full of movies or a small library of books, but those come with their own problems – such as a poor affinity for the damp, salty atmosphere of a boat.
And some extremely seasoned sailors will also argue that boredom kills – that it’s when boredom sets in that crew stop paying attention and accidents happen.
If you prefer to unplug when you set sail, nobody will force you to use your Starlink service for anything but comms and weather reporting. We’ll certainly value being able to back up all our photos and videos without needing to decamp to a restaurant ashore for eight hours while they all upload!
How does Starlink Compare to Satellite Phones?
Starlink uses a couple of pieces of proprietary hardware – a dish to receive the signals from the satellites, and then a router to break out that signal into a format where it can be used by your laptop, phone and other devices.
Satellite internet isn’t a new concept (many sailors will be familiar with things like Iridium Go or Garmin Inreach) – but up until now it’s been hideously expensive and typically limited to a few hundred megabytes per month.
That’s enough for email and weather reports mid-Pacific, but realistically not even enough to email or browse social media, let alone stream Netflix or hold video calls. Starlink changes all that by giving you something that promises to rival your domestic internet connection, even in the most remote and distant latitudes.
To put this into context with some numbers – let’s start with the extremely popular Iridium Go.
At the time of writing, Iridium Go costs $715 upfront, and then about $2 a minute to connect ($650 for a 300-minute pre-paid card).
It maxes out at 2.5kbps, which means it would take roughly 11 minutes to load the homepage of Facebook. Downloading a 1-hour episode of your favourite TV programme would take just shy of a week – 6.94 entire days.
That’s 9993.6 minutes, so you’d also pay $21,652.80 for the privilege.
Clearly, this is not what it’s for – it’s for getting emergency comms, GRIB files, weather routing, and so on. At the luxury end of the spectrum, many superyachts boast systems like the Sea Tel SAILOR 9000 – $34,995 up front, for the dizzying speed of 768kps – enabling you to download that 1-hour episode in just 33 minutes.
Unfortunately, it’s also $249 per month to subscribe and $22 per megabyte, so your 1-hour Netflix binge will still set you back in the region of $33,000. Again, we hope, nobody is actually doing this. But we can imagine wealthy clients hosting the odd video call from their boats or sneakily browsing social media at sea.
So how does that compare to Starlink?
At the time of writing, Starlink costs $599 up front and $99 per month thereafter. That nets you unlimited internet at maybe 150mbps – fast enough to download your 1-hour episode in ten seconds or less.
That makes it no less than 60,000 times faster than the Iridium Go, and about 195 times faster than even the ultra-deluxe Sea Tel SAILOR 9000. It’s also about 4 times faster than the average US domestic internet connection – and crucially, it’ll never cost you more than $99 a month regardless of your Netflix binging habits.
Quite a difference. If we took Starlink’s max-rated speed of 500mbps instead, you could more than triple those already astounding figures.
Why doesn’t every cruising sailboat have Starlink, then? Partly because it’s very new. Adam is a huge nerd, so he’s been on the waiting list for about four years – which is how we’ve been able to order a unit so early.
Is it Possible to Use Starlink on a Sailboat?
There are a few ways to answer this question. The basic answer is: apparently, yes you can.
At the time of writing (May 2022), Starlink hasn’t been available for long at all, and there are probably less than a dozen cruising sailboats fitted with Starlink dishes in the whole world. However, initial reports are very good, with early adopters saying the system works extremely well afloat and even underway.
The medium-length answer is: we’re about to find out! We just ordered a Starlink dish to install on our cruising sailboat, test extensively (in Europe, at first), and then write up our findings right here on the blog.
We’ll provide speed tests, latency reports, uptime logs, an experience report on installing and configuring the system, and then update the article regularly as we live with the system and our experience grows.
Maybe it’ll be a disaster! But we don’t think so, which is why we’ve taken the plunge and ordered the $599 dish with $99 per month subscription. We’ll keep you posted – consider subscribing to our newsletter to be the first to know when it’s released.
Cruising sailboats typically have an excellent view of the sky, but they’re not known for their stability. Starlink themselves have suggested that moving platforms such as boats and RVs will need an additional piece of equipment called a “gimbal” – a motorised mount that can automatically pivot the dish around until it’s pointing at a satellite.
But they haven’t officially confirmed that the gimbal exists, or even that it’s in development – let alone when we can get our hands on it.
Some liveaboard sailors have ordered dishes anyway, nominally to use while moored in their home marinas (essentially, just a much more powerful alternative to the marina’s own courtesy WiFi).
Then those same sailors have wondered… why not just give it a go it out on the water? What’s the worst that can happen? And it turns out, nothing bad at all. Reports are that the dish still works just fine without the gimbal mount.
Seemingly those sailors are seeing slightly slower speeds than the advertised 150-200mbps – but not by much. We’ve seen figures around 80-100mbps quoted, which is still 2 – 3 times what we expect to get from our 4G hotspots. And crucially, it’s unlimited.
Our hotspots get us around 100GB per month, which is quite a lot – until you want to stream Netflix or YouTube, or back up your 4K video files to the cloud.
We fill a 128GB SD card with video at least once a month, so we’re often camped out in bars and restaurants trying to sync that with our cloud storage. It’s a pain, and buying enough drinks and snacks to keep the restauranteurs happy quickly adds up.
If we could just get the same speed as our hotspots but unlimited, we’d be very happy – and the word seems to be we can expect much more than that.
But like we said above: the bottom line is, we’re about to find out. Maybe it won’t work for us at all without the gimbal, or maybe it’ll work great on flat days and not when the wind and waves begin to build.
Once we get it, we’ll be sure to document our findings – both in this guide about how to get the internet at sea, and most likely in a stand-alone review of Starlink on a sailboat. Watch this space – and the skies!
Our Findings
Our overall experience with Starlink so far has been excellent. We typically get at least 250mbps down, 30mbps up, anywhere we choose to drop the hook.
Latency is usually out at 90-100ms which is no use for latency-critical applications like gaming, but not an issue for video calls or anything else. We work remotely from the boat and it’s more than sufficient for two people to stream video, push large files around, hold simultaneous calls, and so on.
You might want to know if it works offshore. The answer is “officially no”, but in our experience, yes.
We’ve used it ~150 miles offshore and pulled a solid 250mpbs while in motion, heeled over. That was in the Med, which may not count as “offshore” in Starlink’s books (there are no international waters here, for example).
But I’ve also seen a lot of anecdotal evidence from people crossing the Atlantic that their dish has worked up to 900 miles offshore. That said, I wouldn’t rely on it offshore for mission-critical comms – not because it’s unreliable, quite the opposite, but simply because Starlink says it doesn’t work, and they could patch it at any time.
Starlink has both a constellation of LEO satellites and a number of terrestrial base stations scattered around the world.
The residential and RV versions will, in theory, only work when they’re within a reasonable distance of a base station. Away from base stations, the satellites can communicate with each other via a laser link, and in theory, we don’t have access to that laser link as residential or RV customers.
If you want the laser-link (and guaranteed offshore access) you have to buy the eye-watering expensive “yacht” version, which is $5,000 a month, and clearly aimed at superyachts, cruise liners, and so on, rather than sailors.
But many sailors report accessing the internet way beyond the reach of a base station, so it’s not a clear picture. Again, my takeaway would be “don’t bet on it”.
Naturally, there are some disadvantages.
The first is it’s not cheap – the initial outlay for the dish is about $600, and then we’re paying something like $80 a month (70 Euros).
We were paying nearly twice that up until a few months ago when Starlink reduced prices for lots of countries. Because ours is registered in Greece (a comparatively poor country to the UK or US) we got a large reduction – I think it was EUR 120 a month before the reduction.
It’s easy for us to justify the cost because it enables remote work, but it’s definitely something to bear in mind. If you’re stateside, I think you pay more for the same service.
The next consideration is power consumption.
We have the original Starlink dish, recognisable by its large, round shape. It draws about 100W under heavy use, down to 60W when we’re not doing much.
If you’re on 12V that’s something like ten amps after losses – a lot, when you’re running it 24 hours a day, and making all your own power.
The second generation – rectangular and smaller – draws 45-75W depending on load, so the dish you receive makes a huge difference to off-grid viability.
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Another thing to be aware of is the range of different subscriptions you can choose between. We’re on the residential subscription, but there is an “RV” version specifically tailored to vehicle applications.
We decided against it because (1) it’s more expensive and (2) it has lower service priority than residential.
The main advantage is that you can pause and resume the RV subscription if you don’t use the boat year-round (you continue paying for residential whether you use it or not). We live on the boat, so it wasn’t a major factor for us.
Supposedly Starlink will one day patch the residential dish so it doesn’t work when it’s more than X distance from the home address, but we’ve taken it to four countries thus far without a problem.
Regarding aviation, Starlink has announced an aviation-specific version, but I’d hazard a guess it’s aimed at commercial airlines rather than private pilots. Starlink-enabled flights have already taken place – the first was a few days ago.
A final thing to be aware of is that the speed you get out of Starlink is inversely proportional to the number of users in your area.
I see a lot of people in American cities complaining that it’s slower than their old copper connection. I’m not really sure why you would buy Starlink in a city, when you have access to fiber. Rural American customers seem to have comparable speeds to us.
Starlink recently started limiting the amount of data US customers can use during peak hours to try to mitigate that (1TB per month during peak hours, unlimited the rest).
Conclusion: Starlink For Boats
Hopefully that has answered your Starlink questions and helped you decide whether to opt for it or not. Personally, it has changed our lives on board and we already feel we have enormously benefitted from it.
Time will tell whether it becomes truly life-saving for sailors, but we’re pretty sure it’s something you won’t be leaving port without in years to come!
For up-to-date news of our sailing adventures follow us on social media where we post our most up-to-date photos and videos.
Hi Emily, Adam (and Tiny Cat!),
I’ve been keeping an eye on your adventures for some time, mostly through your writing but also a bit of video too 🙂 We recently bought a boat, with the plan to live aboard (with our one-time street dog) and working from the boat from next spring, which we’re both crazy excited for! The boat is going in the water next month (first time with us as owners!), but will need a bit of work before she’s ready to liveaboard full-time.
I’ve been looking at the options for internet a bit and wanted to try hotspotting rather than jumping straight into something pricier like Starlink straight away (How did you get on with it by the way?). You mentioned you typically had hotspots of around 100GB per month- could I ask were these using local sim cards? Do you maybe have any tips for providers or sim cards in certain countries in the Med? We’ll be starting in Greece, and from there who knows! Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thank you for the great content, and hopefully for your reply, and fair winds in any case!
Richard, Maxi (and Minca)
Hi Emily, Adam (and Tiny Cat!),
I’ve been keeping an eye on your adventures for some time, mostly through your writing but also a bit of video too 🙂 We recently bought a boat, with the plan to live aboard (with our one-time street dog) and working from the boat from next spring, which we’re both crazy excited for! The boat is going in the water next month (first time with us as owners!), but will need a bit of work before she’s ready to liveaboard full-time.
I’ve been looking at the options for internet a bit and wanted to try hotspotting rather than jumping straight into something pricier like Starlink straight away (How did you get on with it by the way?). You mentioned you typically had hotspots of around 100GB per month- could I ask were these using local sim cards? Do you maybe have any tips for providers or sim cards in certain countries in the Med? We’ll be starting in Greece, and from there who knows! Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thank you for the great content, and hopefully for your reply, and fair winds in any case!
Richard
I hope your boat didn’t sink! I’ve been looking for an update on your Starlink at Sea trials, as your results will impact my decision to move forward. Or not.
Have an update for us?
Thanks!
Peter
Thanks for sharing. I absolutely loved your ideas.