Starlink Roaming Changes: What Cruisers Need to Know

Over the last 4-5 years, many long-distance cruising sailors have become increasingly dependent on Starlink for broadband connectivity whether it be for obtaining weather, routing and technical advice when offshore sailing or for enabling distance working when in remote locations. Starlink has made this possible at a much cheaper cost than previous satellite broadband systems and sailors have been able to take advantage of the roaming plans offered by Starlink.

Now Starlink has cancelled its global roam plan and also changed its international roam plan to be more expensive and to have fewer roaming days (30 instead of 60). It has track record of doing this in the past, but this summer’s changes are more significant than before. The reduced ability to use the international roam plan will force many sailors to either pay more for the higher-priced global priority plan or significantly reduce their use of Starlink.

The upshot is that many live-aboard sailors will go back to using mobile data connectivity, and only using Starlink when strictly necessary, which seems counter-productive to Starlink’s goal of being a ubiquitous provider. There are several campaigns underway in the live-aboard community to try and get Starlink to back down on these changes so we will have to see if Starlink is responsive to its users.

For those offshore sailing they will end up paying more for data if they go over their data allowance and so will need to reduce their use of Starlink for non-essential purposes. However, in the global priority plan, Starlink still provides a low level of bandwidth (up to 1Mbps download) after you exceed your data allowance and this should be sufficient for weather routing etc.

In summary, sailors have managed without Starlink in the past, and now we will have to think carefully as to whether we want to become dependent on a quasi-monopoly supplier. It’s possible that the Amazon Leo system will become an alternative but it’s not yet available and we don’t know the details yet of the service offering.