Design & installation
How do you decide where to mount the terminals and antennas?
We start from the vessel’s GA drawings and do an obstruction study: Starlink flat high-performance terminals go where they have the clearest sky view (hardtop, mast platforms, aft rails), physically separated so a single obstruction or spray zone can’t take out every terminal at once. Cellular and OneWeb antennas are placed for diversity, away from radar and each other.
How do you integrate an existing VSAT dome as a backup?
We bring the VSAT in as one more bonded WAN at a lower priority (or a hot-failover sub-tunnel), so it’s a backstop for the remainder of its contract while Starlink/OneWeb carry the load. As the new paths prove out, VSAT is demoted or dropped — no rip-and-replace needed.
Power, heat, and redundancy for long passages?
Cores are rackmount (Balance/EPX-class) with dual power supplies and an optional High-Availability pair for zero-downtime. We plan the rack’s thermal load and PoE budget for the terminals, and add a UPS so a brief power event never drops the bond.
Performance & reliability
How do you handle rain fade, satellite handoffs, and a moving vessel?
This is exactly what SpeedFusion is for. Bonding several Starlinks plus OneWeb and coastal 5G means no single fade or handoff reaches the application — WAN smoothing duplicates packets across paths and FEC rebuilds losses, so a per-terminal dip is invisible. “Ignore Starlink outages” smooths the brief re-orient events.
How much smoothing do I actually need?
Start with straight bonding for bulk traffic. Add WAN smoothing (medium/high) for real-time flows — owner/guest video calls, bridge operations — and reserve maximum smoothing or FEC for the most latency-critical traffic. You tune it per traffic class with outbound policy and sub-tunnels, so you only pay the smoothing overhead where it matters.
What real throughput should I expect with 8–20 terminals?
Aggregate scales with terminals and constellation health: representative deployments see ~2 Gbps on a dozen bonded Starlinks and 3 Gbps+ beyond eighteen (see our case studies). Real numbers depend on constellation load and how much you weight resilience (smoothing/FEC) versus raw speed.
Management, crew & compliance
How do you separate crew, guest, and ship-ops traffic, with usage caps?
Each gets its own VLAN/SSID: owner and guest on smoothed priority paths, crew and ship systems tiered behind, CCTV/backups as a bulk class. Per-group bandwidth limits and reservations keep any one group from starving the others, and captive portals plus per-SIM/data-pool caps control guest usage.
How do you manage SIMs and data pooling across a fleet?
A SIM Injector centralizes physical SIMs, and eSIM plus Peplink data pools let vessels draw from a shore-managed, shared pool. Top-ups, caps, and remote SIM selection are all handled centrally in InControl — no crew swapping SIMs.
What about regulatory and data-usage reporting (FCC, flag state)?
The Peplink hardware is standard, type-approved networking gear; the licensing that matters at sea rides with the satellite/cellular service and your flag state, so we coordinate with your carriers rather than give legal advice. For reporting, InControl gives per-vessel and per-pool usage you can export.
What does ETO handover and training look like?
West Networks NOC-monitors the fleet and trains your ETO on a single InControl dashboard, with documented configuration and a care plan. You get one pane of glass and a number to call, not a pile of manuals.
Still have a question? Talk to a West Networks engineer — we design and NOC-manage these networks every day. Want the deeper theory? See Peplink University.