Starlink

The Best Option for Most Cruising Sailors

Roam-Unlimited Service Plan

• Service Address: Fiji, Tonga, Panama, Marshall Islands (or other low-cost country). We use a marina in Fiji as our address.
• Dish Kit: Starlink Mini, Gen 2, or Gen 3. They all work on a boat.

Comparison of South Pacific Options

Roam-Unlimited Plan for common service address countries normalized to USD (per month):

• Vanuatu: $11,400VUV (~$95USD)
• Papua New Guinea: $420 PGK (~$96USD)
• Tonga: 240TOP (~$100 USD)
• Samoa: $280WST (~$102USD)
• American Samoa: $105 USD
• Panama: $105USD
• Mexico: $2,150MXP ($106 USD)
• Fiji: $240FJD (~$109 USD)
• Marshall Islands: $110 USD
• Solomon Islands: $890SBD (~$111USD)
• Malaysia: $455MYR (~$115)
• Kiribati: $170A (~$122USD)
• Tuvalu: $170A (~$122USD)
• Cook Islands: $220NZD (~$131NZD)
• NZ: $235NZD (~$140 USD)
• Niue: $235NZD (~$140 USD)
• Australia: $210AUD (~$151 USD)
• United States: $175USD

Choosing a Service Address Country

Starlink lets you choose the country in which you base your subscription—the “service address.” Give some consideration to which country you select:

1. Price
2. Where Starlink will ship your warranty replacement or accessories
3. Where you’ll be spending time (helpful if Starlink enforces the “60 Day Rule”)

Some cruisers have friends or family in a country who can receive and re-ship a replacement to them. Their address may be a good choice even if the subscription costs more.

Changing Your Account and Service Address to a New Country

If your current service address country doesn’t offer Roam-Unlimited as a subscription option (or you otherwise want to move your service address to a place closer to where you are sailing), you need to setup a new account and transfer your dish to your new account.

Not every service address in every country offers Roam-Unlimited as a subscription option. It’s easy to shop around on the Starlink site to determine a country address that will work for you and that offers Roam-Unlimited.

Follow these steps:

Cancel your current subscription. Note your dish serial number and kit number. You need it to activate it on your new account

Transfer your dish

Activate your dish and select “New Account”

Follow the prompts to establish the account and payment method and select “Roam-Unlimited as your subscription option

If you want to keep using your same email address and you are a gmail user, you can use gmail’s alias feature. It makes it possible to avoid setting up a completely new email address for your new account.

Example: name@gmail.com becomes name+starlink2@gmail.com

Identity Verification

Starlink may require you to verify your identity. You'll get a message and a support ticket requesting you upload your passport and a selfie photo. This seems to apply to Roam plans. It's likely Starlink is complying with the "know your customer” laws that many countries have. Since your Roam plan means you could pop up in a country that requires Starlink to validate your identity, they are requiring this of all Roam customers. 

Starlink hasn't made an official announcement on why they are requiring identity verification now. I'm inferring this from a support conversation I had.

Limitations on Transferring Your Dish

Some users have run into a limits on transferring their dish. You may not be able to transfer your dish if your recently purchased it or recently activated it. Nothing stops you from creating a support ticket explaining your situation and asking for an exception.

Transferring Services is not available until the earlier of (i) 120 days after you purchased your Starlink Kit, or (ii) 90 days after you activated your Starlink Kit.

Dish Choices

Any of the currently available dishes will work on a boat.

• Starlink Mini (25-40 watts)
• Starlink Gen2 (45-74 watts)
• Starlink Gen3 (75-100 watts)
• High Performance Dish (110-150 watts)

Our Gen2 dish draws about 30 watts. Sometimes a bit more when it's raining or we're moving. Since we are an AC-based boat our inverter is always running anyway so we don't incur any additional inverter overhead using Starlink. Boats who are DC-based and who don't run their inverter full time may benefit from the Starlink Mini's ability to be powered directly by the ship's DC system.

We are heavy internet users with frequent video calls (sometimes two going simultaneously). We've never seen the need for the high performance dish.

When we are off the grid we set the "sleep mode" on starlink so that it sleeps from about 11pm to 6am which saves a little energy.

Our Current Configuration

• Subscription Plan: Roam - Unlimited: 225FJD (~$100USD) per month
• Service Address: Fiji (Vuda Marina)
• Ocean Mode / Overage Data when away from land (more than about 12 miles):
• Hardware: Gen2 Dish Kit, Stock OEM Starlink router
• Dish Orientation: Automatic (not flat)
• Dish Motors: Working (not disabled)
• Mount: Generic rail mount from Amazon, mounted on stern rail behind the port helm.
• Spares: Gen3 dish kit and router, Spare cable (router to dish), Starlink Mini dish stowed in the ditch bag with a battery adapter.

Our Data Consumption

We use 300GB to 400GB of data each month when we are near land and running on “unlimited” data. This with no effort to control or manage the data usage of our various devices. We have two laptops, two iPhones, one iPad, one Smart TV, a PredictWind Datahub, and our Victron Cerbo all connected.

Offshore on a passage, we use about 4GB to 5GB per day provided we have our devices in “low data” mode.

Using Starlink Offshore with Roam-Unlimited

Here is what Starlink has to say about “ocean-use” with the Roam-Unlimited plan:

If you are on the Roam Unlimited service plan you will need to opt-in to Global Priority data to use Starlink on international waters.

Our Roam-Unlimited plan has a “Global Priority” data toggle, similar to the old “Mobile Priority” toggle. We hope this means we can continue using the plan as usual.

Starlink may permit Roam Unlimited users to opt-in to purchase Global Priority data. Such permission may be revoked by Starlink in its sole discretion at any time.

What Happens Offshore?

If you don’t toggle on Global Priority data and you sail 12 miles away from land, you’ll see this:

It means you need to toggle on Ocean Mode / Overage data. On short passages between islands we often don’t bother. A few hours of disconnected-ness isn’t a bad thing.

Roam-Unlimited and the “60 Day” Rule

According to their terms, Starlink may limit the use of Roam-Unlimited outside of your home country to just 60 days. This has not been enforced for any of the South Pacific service addresses over the past two years (that we are aware of).

Starlink’s terms of service seem to indicate that this rule is invoked in areas that are sold out or have heavy bandwidth contention from land-based subscribers. That may explain why the term isn’t enforced here in French Polynesia. There are no land-based subscribers here.

If Starlink starts to enforce the 60-day rule for the Roam-Unlimited subscription plan in our location, it will require some planning and moving your subscription to a new country from time to time. But so far, that hasn't been necessary.

Roam Unlimited users in an area with high network congestion where Residential Services are marked as “Sold Out” on the Starlink map for longer than 60 consecutive days, Starli fee or upgrade to a different Service plan

Anticipating Changes to Starlink Plans

Recently, some subscribers on the “Mobile Priority” subscription plans have been forced to switch to new plans.

If Starlink eliminates the Roam-Unlimited plan or otherwise limits the use of it, we’ll likely be left with one of the “Priority Subscription” plans—Local or Global—which are available now.

Local & Global Priority Plans

The Local and Global Priority plans for business users have two parts: a monthly terminal fee and a per-GB data block fee. The price varies by service location, with Fiji being one of the least expensive.

If our current Roam-Unlimited plan were not an option, we'd be left with a Global Priority subscription. A 500GB block would cost $405FJD/mo plus $1,350FJD/mo, totaling $1,755FJD/mo or about $765USD/mo.

In that case, we’d abandon Fiji and opt for a US-based Global Priority 500GB plan at $650/month.

Gen2 Dish: Flat Orientation & Disabled Motors

Early on, there were far fewer Starlink satellites in the sky. There are over 7,000 operational satellites today. Back in 2022 when cruisers were starting to use Starlink, there were half that many. Some users found that forcing the dish flat and disabling the orientation motors (by drilling a hole in the bottom of the dish) resulted in faster acquisition times and better performance.

That is less of an issue today. However, there are times when we are at anchor and swinging around rapidly that we use the app to set the dish flat to improve the performance.

The latest Gen3 dish is flat and has no motors.

Gen2 Dish Reliability

We’ve recently had our third Gen2 dish suffer a failed GPS chip. This is not an uncommon problem with these dishes. The symptoms include:

• Difficulty maintaining a connection while in motion

• Slow to reacquire a connection

• “Determining Location” message on the app screen never clears

• Debug Data shows “ GPS is not valid”

  

  

Starlink will replace the dish. It will be shipped to your service address. You can change and update the service address, but you can’t change countries. Our service address is currently in Fiji. When the last dish failed, our warranty replacement was sent to our service address in Fiji. We arranged for DHL to pick it up there and ship it to us in Tahiti. It took about 10 days. The shipping costs were what a new kit would have cost, but they aren’t available in Tahiti, so it was worth it.

For our latest replacement, Starlink is shipping us a Gen3 dish. They no longer offer Gen2 dishes in our part of the world. We’ll need to work out a new mount for that.

We swapped out our spare Gen2 before we crossed the Dangerous Middle to Fiji. Once in Fiji we picked up the replacement Gen3 dish. The spare Gen2 dish is still on the stern rail. Now we also have a Starlink Mini dish (in the ditch bag) which is what we'd likely use if this Gen2 dish fails.

Activating a Spare Starlink Dish

We needed to swap out our failed Gen2 dish with a spare. We’ve got a long passage coming up, and the failed dish won’t hold a connection while we are sailing.

It was easy to do. www.starlink.com/activate. The activation site will ask if you want to open a new account or activate your spare dish on your existing account. We chose the latter. It lets you select the subscription plan specific to that dish. We stayed with a Fiji-based Roam-Unlimited plan.

Once the spare dish was up and running for two days, we paused the subscription on the failed dish. That way, we don’t have to pay for two subscriptions.

I needed an internet connection to complete this process. Do it when you have 4G/5G cellular access or before your current dish completely fails (my method here).

Make sure your spare dish is free from a previous account and has been “transferred.”

For now, we are back in action!

What is the Deal with Starlink and French Polynesia?

Starlink is not available in French Polynesia. You can’t buy the equipment here, and you can’t subscribe to the service here. You can’t use a French Polynesia service address.

Recent reports suggest you can’t get a Starlink dish kit shipped here anymore (we were able to get a warranty replacement shipped to Tahiti back in September 2024).

Starlink has to negotiate tariff and operating agreements with each regulator in each country in which it sells its equipment and service. It is a herculean legal and business development challenge. That accounts for the different prices and experiences subscribers have among various countries.

OPT/Onati Monopoly and OneWeb/EutelSat

French Polynesia has granted their external telecommunications monopoly to the incumbent operator, Office des Postes et Télécommunications (OPT), and its operational subsidiary, Onati. OPT/Onati’s stated strategy is to partner with OneWeb (owned by EutelSat) for satellite-based internet. Availability of a solution from them was scheduled for the first quarter of 2025. That did not happen. No specifics about services and pricing have been announced. 

Whether OPT/Onati eventually launches a service and whether it is competitive with Starlink remains to be seen.

Permission to Import Starlink Dish Kits

There is a case currently before the administrative tribunal in Papeete. This case specifically challenges an administrative decision banning the importation of Starlink antennas into French Polynesia. It is reportedly the first such refusal to be formally adjudicated by the tribunal. The outcome of this case may determine whether sailors and residents can import Starlink dish kits into French Polynesia.

Our Experience

Starlink is a game changer (an overused expression but true in this case). It has allowed me to build and run a global consulting business while sailing across the Pacific and through French Polynesia. We stay in daily contact with our friends and family through phone and video. It enables luxuries like watching movies, popular shows, and the NFL Super Bowl streamed to our computers or television.

For sailing and passaging making, you can’t beat instantaneous access to weather information. It is helpful to access the current satellite loop to determine what you will soon face or how long you’ll be dealing with the current conditions. Before Starlink, the best we got was a single satellite image download that might be half a day old.

It’s not without its drawbacks. It changes the nature of the cruising experience. We are still nearly as “connected” as we were back home. It has largely killed off the HF Radio nets on HAM and SSB as well as the local VHF morning cruiser’s net. Those have been replaced by WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, and apps like NoForeignLand.

People complain about Starlink changing its plans and terms. This is the nature of iterative development. Try new things. Keep what works. Abandon or change what doesn’t. That approach is what gets you high-speed, low-latency internet in the middle of the ocean at an affordable price (in your cruising lifetime).

People hate change and unpredictability. If you want predictability and stability, you’ll get your cable company (or your mobile carrier). And they don’t have high-speed internet in the middle of the ocean (and likely never will).

Not everyone loves Starlink. We get it. But we wouldn’t go back.

Thank you to Ian Clarke and Chris Rabbidge for their editorial contributions to this post.

Disclaimer: This is based on our direct experience right now. The situation could change at any time. Starlink’s enforcement of its terms and conditions varies by location. What we experience here in the South Pacific may not be what you experience where you are.

Anyone who claims to know what Starlink will do in the future is just guessing. Nobody knows what will change.

We have no affiliation with Starlink or SpaceX other than that of a subscriber.

Comments