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The best infrastructure upgrade is the one that changes the numbers without changing the design. When a vessel’s connectivity demand outgrows its core, you want more capacity — not a new architecture, new cabling, and a new set of things that can break.

Same design, bigger engine

A real maritime deployment began on a high-availability pair of Peplink EPX routers bonding a dozen-plus satellite terminals. As guest demand and per-terminal throughput climbed, the core was upgraded to a high-availability pair of Balance 5000 EC routers — purpose-built for high-density WAN aggregation and 30+ Gbps of SpeedFusion bonding. The VLAN trunking, the terminal layout, and the HA model all stayed the same. Only the ceiling moved.

Why the same platform scales

• One SpeedFusion engine runs the whole Peplink line, so the config concepts carry straight over.
• One management plane — InControl 2 — sees the old and new cores identically.
• Headroom for the future — as satellite throughput per terminal grows, the core is no longer the bottleneck.

That is what it means to own your network: you add capacity on your schedule, on hardware you already understand, without a forklift.

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Own your network. Peplink hardware is bought once and it lasts — it keeps bonding and routing with or without an active warranty or the cloud. No forced subscriptions, no required licenses.

Learn the fundamentals at connectivity101.com.

Ask a ship’s crew what they want from the internet and the answer is never “fast failover.” It is “I never think about it.” That is the real product of bonding, and it is a fundamentally different thing from a backup link.

The ocean is a hostile RF environment

A vessel is always moving. Satellites hand off, the superstructure shadows a dish, weather rolls in, and any single terminal’s performance rises and falls minute to minute. A failover design would be constantly switching — every switch a visible hiccup. Guests on a video call would feel each one.

Bonding makes the chaos invisible

SpeedFusion spreads every session across all terminals at the packet level. When one dish drops, its share is already covered by the others — no switch, no reconnect, no gap. Dynamic Weighted Bonding continuously rebalances toward the links that are performing right now. The result the crew describes is simply: it works.

That is the mantra made literal. If your maritime plan includes the word “failover,” you are planning for the outage. Bonding plans for it never happening.

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Own your network. Peplink hardware is bought once and it lasts — it keeps bonding and routing with or without an active warranty or the cloud. No forced subscriptions, no required licenses.

Learn the fundamentals at connectivity101.com.

Bonding protects you when a link fails. But what protects you when the router fails? At sea, where there is no spare hardware ashore and no technician a phone call away, the core itself has to be redundant.

Two cores, one identity

A high-availability pair runs two core routers configured as one. If the active unit fails, the standby takes over the same addresses and sessions — the ship’s network stays up. Combine that with SpeedFusion bonding across all the satellite links, and you have removed both failure modes: a dead link is absorbed by the bond, and a dead router is covered by its twin.

Designed to survive, and to grow

This is why serious maritime deployments run HA pairs of aggregation-class routers — and why upgrading the platform (say, from EPX to Balance 5000 EC) keeps the same proven HA model in place. You add capacity without adding risk. The redundancy that kept the ship online at 2 Gbps keeps it online at 30.

Uptime, stability, simplicity, lower cost — on a vessel, redundancy is how you buy all four at once.

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Own your network. Peplink hardware is bought once and it lasts — it keeps bonding and routing with or without an active warranty or the cloud. No forced subscriptions, no required licenses.

Learn the fundamentals at connectivity101.com.

How do you get twelve, sixteen, or twenty satellite terminals into a router that does not have twenty WAN ports? The answer is one of Peplink’s most useful tricks: VLAN-as-WAN trunking.

Turn switch ports into WAN links

Each terminal connects to a managed switch, and each gets its own VLAN. The switch trunks those VLANs to the core router over a single high-speed link, and the router treats every VLAN as an independent WAN connection. Suddenly a router with a handful of physical ports can bond dozens of links.

Why it fits a vessel

• Physical diversity — terminals split port and starboard, so the superstructure never blocks all of them at once.
• Clean cabling — one trunk to the core instead of a rat’s nest of WAN runs.
• Scales by adding a VLAN — a new dish is a switch-port change, not a new router.

SpeedFusion then bonds all of them into one tunnel. It is the same technique that lets a mammography vehicle bond ten roof modems — proof that a good architecture travels from a van to a cruise ship unchanged.

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Own your network. Peplink hardware is bought once and it lasts — it keeps bonding and routing with or without an active warranty or the cloud. No forced subscriptions, no required licenses.

Learn the fundamentals at connectivity101.com.

Cruise ships are among the most demanding connectivity environments on the planet: thousands of guests expecting the internet they have at home — streaming, video calls, social — in the middle of the ocean, on a platform that never stops moving. Traditional VSAT was expensive, slow, and could not scale.

The architecture

West Networks designed and deployed the Starlink-based architecture for a leading global cruise line — widely regarded as the fastest internet on any cruise ship. Twelve to twenty Starlink terminals, mounted port and starboard, are presented to a redundant pair of core routers via VLAN-as-WAN trunking. SpeedFusion bonds every terminal into one high-speed tunnel with intelligent load balancing and instant failover.

When a dish loses signal to the ship’s motion or a satellite handoff, the remaining links absorb the traffic instantly. Passengers never notice. The network simply works.

The 2025 upgrade

As demand grew, the core was upgraded from the Peplink EPX to a high-availability pair of Balance 5000 EC routers — unlocking 30+ Gbps of SpeedFusion bonding capacity and years of headroom as per-terminal throughput rises. The proven HA redundancy model stayed exactly the same.

• Zero-downtime failover across 12–20 bonded terminals.
• Consistent speed for thousands of guests and crew, daily.
• A core that scales with the fleet instead of being redesigned.

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Own your network. Peplink hardware is bought once and it lasts — it keeps bonding and routing with or without an active warranty or the cloud. No forced subscriptions, no required licenses.

Learn the fundamentals at connectivity101.com.

“How many Starlinks do we actually need?” is the first question every captain,
ETO, and fleet manager asks — and the honest answer is: it depends on three
numbers you already know. Vessel size and mission, peak concurrent demand, and
what downtime costs you. Let’s size it properly.

Start with the demand budget

Forget marketing bandwidth; budget from real loads:

• 4K stream: 15–25 Mbps each. A charter party can run six at once.
• Video call: 3–8 Mbps each, but latency- and jitter-sensitive — these are
  the flows that get WAN smoothing priority.
• Crew phones: 30 crew in the evening ≈ 100–300 Mbps of comfortable headroom.
• Ops: CCTV offload, ERP sync, telemetry — usually modest until it isn’t
  (survey data is its own category; see 40G).

A 60 m charter yacht at peak realistically wants 400–800 Mbps to feel limitless.
A commercial vessel focused on crew welfare and ops is comfortable at 300–600.
An offshore survey campaign moving terabytes wants every gigabit it can get:
at 4 Mbps of legacy VSAT, a 1 TB offload takes 23 days; at 2 Gbps it takes
about 90 minutes.

The three tiers

Maritime 10G Kit
— yachts under 50 m, workboats, coastal commercial.
Four bonded Starlinks + OneWeb + dual coastal 5G on a Balance SDX Pro core.
Measured: 600–900 Mbps down. About $38,000 one-time, from ~$3,000/month. This is
the tier that embarrasses a $6,000/month, 4 Mbps VSAT bill — near cost-parity in
year one, roughly $30k/year cheaper thereafter, at 150–200× the bandwidth.

Maritime 20G Kit
— 50–90 m superyachts, offshore support vessels, ferries.
Twelve bonded Starlinks + OneWeb + quad 5G on an EPX chassis — up to seventeen
paths. Measured: 2+ Gbps down. About $85,000 one-time, $10,000–$14,000/month.
For the price of a 10 Mbps dedicated VSAT plan you carry two hundred times the
bandwidth, with per-VLAN steering so the owner’s deck never competes with the
crew mess.

Maritime 40G Kit
— 90 m+ yachts, drillships, survey and expedition vessels.
Sixteen to twenty Starlinks + dual OneWeb + quad 5G on dual redundant EPX
cores — no single point of failure anywhere, including the rack. Measured: 3–4+
Gbps. This tier exists for one reason: when a day of standby costs $30,000–
$100,000, connectivity is an SLA line, not an amenity. It pays for itself the
first time it saves one day.

Three sizing rules from the field

1. Size for the worst evening, not the average day. Connectivity complaints
happen at 21:00 with every cabin streaming — budget for that hour.

2. Buy diversity before capacity. Eight terminals on one constellation are
weaker than six Starlinks plus OneWeb plus 5G. Different vendors, orbits, and
physics are what make the connection unbreakable; raw capacity is just what
makes it fast.

3. Leave rail space. Demand only grows. The kits scale like Lego — the 10G
core accepts more terminals later, and a 20G install with two spare WAN slots is
a cheap insurance policy against next season’s expectations.

The shortcut

Or skip the napkin: send us your GA drawings, operating region, and current
connectivity bill, and a West Networks maritime engineer will return a sized
design — terminal count, placement, expected measured throughput, and honest
month-one and year-one costs — usually within a business day.

Talk to West Networks
· Shop the Maritime kits

(~720 words)

Walk any marina this season and you’ll see the flat white rectangles multiplying
on hardtops. Starlink aboard is no longer news. What’s news is what serious
vessels do next: they stop treating the terminal as a gadget and start treating
it as a building block — because four to twenty of them, properly bonded, become
something no VSAT contract ever offered: gigabits at sea, with no single point
of failure.

Here’s how it actually works.

Why one terminal isn’t a platform

A single Starlink terminal is genuinely good — 150–250 Mbps down, 20–40 up, 30–60
ms latency. But run a charter season or an offshore campaign on one and you’ll
meet its limits fast:

• It’s one point of failure. One cable, one radome of electronics, no SLA.
• It dips. Obstructions from the mast or superstructure, satellite-to-satellite
  handoffs, momentary rain fade — each causes second-scale interruptions that a
  Zoom call notices even when a speed test doesn’t.
• It caps. However fast one terminal is, that’s the ceiling for the whole
  vessel — owner, guests, crew, CCTV, and the ops laptop all share it.

None of these are flaws to fix. They’re the reason to add more terminals.

The bonding layer

Bolting up twelve terminals does nothing by itself — you’d have twelve separate
networks and a very confused IT closet. The transformation happens in the bonding
core: a Peplink SpeedFusion engine (a
Balance SDX Pro
for smaller arrays, an
EPX chassis
for 12–20 paths) that treats every terminal as one more WAN and splits your
traffic across all of them, packet by packet, inside a single tunnel.

Three properties fall out:

Capacity stacks. Twelve terminals at 150–250 Mbps each aggregate to 2+ Gbps
measured at sea — enough for simultaneous 4K streams in every cabin, cloud
backups, CCTV offload, and a boardroom-grade video call, with headroom.

Failover is hot. When terminal 7 hits a handoff dip, packets simply stop
being scheduled onto it — they’re already flowing on the other eleven. There’s no
session to rebuild, so the “outage” lasts milliseconds and nobody aboard can even
detect it. Compare that to the single-terminal experience, where every dip is
everyone’s dip.

Smoothing erases jitter. For traffic that must be perfect — the owner’s video
call, the bridge’s telemedicine link — SpeedFusion WAN smoothing duplicates
packets across two or more terminals and keeps whichever copy lands first. A
single path’s bad moment simply never reaches the application.

Diversity beyond Starlink

A proper maritime build adds two more path families. A OneWeb terminal puts a
second LEO constellation from a second company in the mix — vendor and orbit
diversity, plus high-latitude coverage. And coastal 5G modems grab cheap bulk
bandwidth for the 20–40% of time most vessels spend within cellular range; the
bonding core shifts heavy traffic ashore automatically and saves your satellite
pool for blue water.

What the array looks like

Flat high-performance terminals are about 50 × 30 cm. Twelve of them fit on the
rails, hardtop, and mast platforms of most vessels over 50 meters — no dome, no
crane. Every West Networks kit starts with a placement study from your GA
drawings, mapping obstructions before anything ships. Installation is a 2–5 day
yard visit; management afterward is one dashboard, remotely watched by our NOC.

That’s the whole trick: LEO changed the physics, bonding changed the
architecture. The result is a connection that scales like Lego — need more, bolt
on more — and fails like a fleet, not like a gadget.

See the pre-built arrays:
shop the Maritime 10G / 20G / 40G kits
or talk to West Networks
for a placement study.

(~780 words)

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There’s a number most vessel operators have never calculated, because for twenty
years there was no point: cost per megabit per month. When VSAT was the only
game at sea, the price was the price.

Run it now and it stings. A typical legacy contract — 4 Mbps committed for $6,000
a month — works out to $1,500 per Mbps per month. A 10 Mbps dedicated plan at
$18,000 lands at $1,800. Add the $30,000–$80,000 stabilized dome, the crane day,
the 36-month lock-in, and overage charges of $50–$150 per gigabyte, and you have
one of the most expensive network services still legally sold.

And the product itself? Roughly 600 milliseconds of round-trip latency — that’s
geostationary physics, not a vendor failing — which means video calls stutter,
cloud apps time out, and your crew rations WhatsApp like it’s fresh water.

The number that changed

A Starlink flat high-performance terminal delivers 150–250 Mbps down and 20–40 up
for about $2,500 in hardware. Latency: 30–60 ms. That single sentence ended the
scarcity era. But one terminal is not the answer for a serious vessel — it’s a
single point of failure with no SLA, it dips during obstructions and satellite
handoffs, and its throughput caps well below what a charter party or an offshore
client demands.

The answer is the architecture: bond them. Peplink SpeedFusion fuses 4–20
Starlink terminals — plus a OneWeb terminal for second-constellation diversity,
plus coastal 5G for the 20–40% of vessel time spent near shore — into a single
self-healing connection. Capacity stacks: vessels bonding 12 terminals measure
2+ gigabits per second at sea. Failover happens per packet, in milliseconds;
one terminal’s rain-fade dip is invisible because eleven others were already
carrying the stream.

The comparison, honestly

Take that $18,000-a-month, 10 Mbps superyacht contract and put a
Maritime 20G Kit
beside it: roughly $85,000 one-time (12 bonded Starlinks, OneWeb, quad 5G, EPX
core, placement study, installation) and $10,000–$14,000 a month in pooled
service.

Same monthly ballpark. Two hundred times the bandwidth. Cost per Mbps falls
from $1,800 to about $6 — and if you don’t need two gigabits and simply match
your real requirements with a smaller
10G Kit,
your monthly bill drops to $3,000–$4,500 and you keep $150,000+ a year.

“But we’re mid-contract”

The most common objection, and the easiest to answer: go hybrid. Install the
bonded kit now and demote the VSAT to one more bonded path — a low-rate backstop.
Two things happen immediately. First, your overage line item — those $50–$150
gigabytes — goes to zero, because bulk traffic rides LEO and 5G. Second, your
crew and guests get gigabit-class service today. Most operators find the overage
savings alone pay for the kit before the VSAT term even expires. At renewal, cut
the committed rate to the minimum or drop the dome entirely.

The question to ask your current provider

Next renewal call, ask one question: “What is my cost per megabit per month?”
If the answer has a comma in it, you’re not buying connectivity anymore — you’re
funding nostalgia.

We’ll do the math for your vessel for free:
talk to West Networks
or shop the Maritime kits.

(~760 words)

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