Starlink is here!

When we were first planning our sailing adventures, we were optimistic that Starlink, a high-speed satellite-based internet service from SpaceX, would enable us to have mid-ocean internet. The promise of the system, with its thousands of satellites and space-lasers, was to offer high bandwidth and minimal latency in locations that terrestrial ISPs just couldn't offer.

Unfortunately, the early rollout of Starlink in 2021 has progressed slowly. While the service works as expected, units were very limited in quantity, and geofenced to a 15 mile radius around the service address. Suddenly our dreams of watching Netflix in the middle of the ocean seemed very far off.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when Elon Musk announced that SpaceX would be enabling roaming mode for Starlink terminals as part of a move to support Ukraine during the Russian invasion. Suddenly the dream of high-speed internet aboard was back on! Intrepid early adopters quickly started sharing success stories of using it on boat trips, including all the way down to Mexico.

Inspired by others' early successes, we decided to bring back the dream and gamble on getting a Starlink dish. We had to employ some workarounds since our home address has no service slots currently available, but Dishy, as the terminal is know, has been happily chugging away in our backyard for a couple of days now. I've even been able to take video calls over it for work!

We're still working on mounting solutions for installing Dishy on Tiamat, but we're feeling very optimistic at this point that our internet situation while cruising, at least through our time in Mexico, will be much improved!