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.
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