Starlink tweak Personal Maritime Broadband Plan to support bigger boats
Good news. Starlink’s new Personal Maritime Plan for users of their ultrafast satellite broadband service, which is currently only being offered to selected customers, has corrected one of the biggest annoyances that appeared shortly after it first launched last month. The plan was previously limited to personal boats of up to 40ft in length, but this has now been extended to 60ft.
As we pointed out in our article on the new plan, a lot of personal sail boats, particularly those used for crossing rougher seas, will often exceed that length by a few feet (just take a stroll around some boat yards in the UK and you’ll see plenty above 40ft). But Starlink has now quietly updated the small print on this plan to increase the maximum length limit to 60ft (credits to PC Mag).
The Personal Maritime Plan will set customers back $185/month (£136), excluding applicable taxes. For that you’ll get unlimited data and use in territorial waters worldwide; Ocean Mode then becomes available beyond 12 nautical miles for $6/GB (i.e. for when you’re travelling beyond the coast and in international waters) and there’s no 30-day Roam international travel limit (except in extremely rare cases when required by local regulations).
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Starlink currently has around 11,100 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – mostly at altitudes of between c.340-550km. Residential users in the UK pay from £40 a month for the 100Mbps unlimited data plan, which also promises uploads of c.15-35Mbps and low latency connectivity (c.20ms). Faster packages exist at greater cost, while more restrictive (data capped) options also exist for roaming users (e.g. £55 per month for 100GB of data).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I fail to see how the LOA restriction can even be enforced, do they require you to supply all of the boat’s documentation when you sign up? Either that or the Starlink terminal has an AIS receiver built in which checks the boat’s broadcast containing the length (among much other data), but small vessels IIRC aren’t required to have an AIS transponder.
Boats have to be registered and that includes details of their length. Yes they do require this evidence.
Can we stop supporting this company? Destroying the planet for billionaires profit.
This comment just made me buy more SpaceX and Tesla stock, thanks for the reminder
A fool & his money easily parted as they say.
£4.42/ GB :-0, People aren’going to be kicking back, with YouTube or Netflix, on their Trans-oceanic crosssing at that eye watering price are they. Elon has obviously decided the Debt collector is at the door. And needs to sweat, those government subidised Starlink asssets. Not surprising, given the way Interest rates are ballooning, on his gargantuan Debts…
Classic price segmentation. Sure they could offer it for $40 a month like the do for fixed Starlink but people who own a trans-oceanic yacht are unlikely to be bothered by such data rates. If they think of it all they likely consider it an amazing bargain compared to what was available before LEO broadband became available (prices started at $5-10 per MEGAbyte before starlink, and a comparable broadband connection cost five figures per month)