Starlink Launch £££ LEO Satellite Broadband Service for Boats

Good news. If you own a boat then SpaceX has just announced a new ‘Maritime‘ product via their Starlink constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based ultrafast broadband ISP satellites, which will give you download speeds of up to 350Mbps and new ruggedised hardware. Bad news, regular boat owners probably can’t afford it.

Starlink currently has around 2,500 LEOs in orbit and their initial plan is to deploy a total of 4,425 by 2024. Customers in the UK currently pay from £89 per month, plus £55 for shipping and £529 for the kit (dish, router etc.). But for that you can expect unlimited usage, fast latency times of 20-40ms, downloads of c. 50-250Mbps and uploads of c.10-20Mbps (speeds may change as the network grows).

The existing service for consumers is thus fairly expensive and there’s also a much more expensive product for business users, as well as the recent launch of their RV solution for motorhomes. Suffice to say, it was only a matter of time before they introduced a product for the boat users too, and that day has finally arrived.

However, the new Starlink Maritime service seems – even from the promotional pictures – to be aimed more at rich owners of super yachts and commercial shipping, which stems from the fact that it costs $5,000 per month (£4,156)! On top of that, there’s the $10,000 (£8,312) one-off charge for the new – more ruggedised – dual, high performance terminals and router hardware (needed to help with signal reception on the high seas and to resist extreme weather / salt water spray etc.).

We did attempt to make a few orders using coastal addresses in the UK, just to see if it was possible to get the correct GBP pricing (usually more expensive than the converted $ price due to VAT etc.), but Starlink kept telling us that the service wasn’t available – despite all the test addresses being within the viable maritime coverage depicted on their map (PDF). Speaking of which, Starlink Maritime doesn’t yet cover all of the world’s seas.

“Still obviously premium pricing, but way cheaper & faster than alternatives. SpaceX was paying $150k/month for a much worse connection to our ships!,” said Elon Musk via Twitter. Indeed, satellite broadband kit for sea faring boats is very expensive, and they can’t match Starlink’s speed. But the monthly rental on something like the KVH TracPhone V3 HTS system (5Mbps down / 2Mbps up) is only $145 – provided you can afford $17k for the kit.

The new service also includes the ability to remotely monitor and manage your Starlink fleet from a single portal and to “pause and un-pause service at any time“, which sounds a lot like what happens when you switch something off and on again.. just saying.