SpaceX first made the Starlink Maritime service available in select regions in July 2022. The business declared in February of this year that it had accomplished worldwide coverage for maritime users on its network, having attained over 3,600 active satellites at that point.
I was entrusted with overseeing the installation of the service on one of the bulk carrier operator’s vessels, who wanted to buy and test the system separately from their satcom provider.
Despite having “global” satellite coverage, only a few nations now sell the Starlink antennas needed to use the service. Among them is not Greece, the “home” of shipping historically. This discrepancy is further complicated by the fact that antennas for terrestrial installation and the RV version can be purchased and used in Greece.
However, the apparatus can be ordered for delivery to a number of different nations. The cost of a single antenna unit when purchased directly from Starlink is approximately US $3,000. An extra charge of about US$180 is required for a 25-meter extended cable, which is required for many marine customers because the regular 8-meter cable won’t fit through most bridge and navigational area design.
In order to minimise problems with “stray” Wi-Fi connectivity and to give the unit hardwired connectivity, an Ethernet adaptor was also necessary for our installation. There aren’t any additional relevant fees aside from the monthly airtime price.
When purchasing directly from Starlink, email assistance is offered. For anyone accustomed to conventional marine communications and satcom support procedures, this might come as a surprise, but in actuality, the response time to emails was judged to be acceptable.
In one instance, a question was posed during “out of office” hours in Europe, and a response was received in less than three hours. After we sent another email reply, Starlink Support called us in two minutes to clarify a few things and let us know that they wanted to assist in resolving the issue as soon as possible.
While the ship was travelling through international waters, the Starlink unit was put into service. When the device was first tested, it was placed flat on the bridge wing, and download speeds between 50 and 70 Mbps were noted while the system was calibrating and updating. During this period, there were a few disconnect sequences that occurred as a result of the antenna and cable being tuned as well as the first power-on self-testing procedures.
Following installation, the antenna unit was allowed to complete its obstruction scan and “tune” At this stage, bandwidth rates higher than 100 Mbps were reported; however, because the device was unsure of the locations of its blockage zones, dropouts occurred. Within 12 hours, the average duration of these dropouts decreased to 15 seconds.
An onshore service provider was enlisted to monitor DNS queries and content in order to guarantee that the crew only visits websites that are considered safe, both legally and to stop trojans or compromised servers from sending payloads to the ship. This service is also accompanied with a reporting portal. In addition to DNS and content filtering, endpoint web monitoring, and a rules-based firewall to limit access are all used to safeguard the company network.
