“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
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