Being aboard Aruna full time means having excellent internet for work and play. I've fine tuned my system to something that works extremely well for remote work use no matter where I am.
Reliable, redundant internet is always a primary goal on any boat I own. This is mainly due to my work which requires high quality Zoom and Teams video sessions for 8-10 hours a day. I discussed this in more detail in an article from 2021 titled Working remotely from the boat including specific applications like Zoom, Office 365, and some tips and tricks to get the most out of the setup.
Steve Mitchell
The goals are similar for Aruna - high quality, redundant internet using multiple sources that is usable throughout the boat for work, navigation, and play. Here are the pieces that help me achieve that.
Router
A good router is key to a quality internet setup. I'm currently using the Peplink BR2 Pro 5G router with excellent results. It has a great mix of LAN and WAN ports, a USB port for an additional WAN port, and two cellular radios. It has been rock solid in terms of performance and reliability.
The router is mounted in a cabinet in the flybridge along with the Starlink power supplies and other related equipment.
The cabinet itself is made of fiberglass, so I opted to not use big external marine antennas and just use the factory antennas for both cellular and WiFi. In the last 9 months of use, I've had really good results with those antennas, which is not surprising, as this is a configuration I've used myself many times before while testing, and setup for many customers who couldn't install antennas due to space or cable lengths.
Not using big marine antennas surprises some folks, as those have been a recommendation for years in most setups. The biggest reason I've not put dedicated antennas in for cellular is because of the location of the router combined with the advent of Starlink.
While having those antennas would definitely allow me to pull in signals in very poor conditions, I would not likely be trying to do that given that I have Starlink. In addition, the holes in the cabinet, grommets, cables and connectors, windage from the antennas, and requirements for spacing them away from other antennas add more complexity to the entire setup. This is a common choice in more recent customer installs as well.
For WAN connections, I'm using the two on board ethernet ports for 2 of my Starlinks, and then a USB ethernet adapter plugged into the USB port for the 3rd Starlink.
For LAN connections, I'm using one port from the BR2 to a switch in the lounge area inside the boat, and the other three are connected to various critical systems including my Maretron IPG100, HomeAssistant, and my SignalK linux machine.
I have several networks including production, test, guest, and navigation, and leverage common features you can find on any decent router including DHCP restrictions and reservations, DNS entries for common systems, MAC address restrictions, bandwidth shaping and more. Having started my career in networking, I prefer to use as many features as possible to prevent people from doing stupid / bad things and making my network (or me) grumpy.
Access Points
Because Aruna is a steel boat, it makes it particularly challenging for WiFi signals to reach different parts of the interior. The steel roof/deck structure between the primary living areas and the flybridge almost completely blocks the WiFi signals from the router mounted there.
As a result, I put a Peplink AP One AX access point in a cabinet in the lounge area that serves most of the devices inside of the boat. I am also using the built in access point on the router so that my Vesper Cortex base, which is installed in the flybridge, and a couple of outdoor cameras can connect to the network. It is also what our mobile devices switch to whenever we're outside.
This does result in less performance for WiFi as WAN when I am using that feature, but that is generally when I am at a marina, in which case outdoor WiFi is already polluted with everyone else's signal and doesn't really matter as much.
I'm not completely happy with the performance of the Peplink AP. Some devices don't work as well with it, and it requires a reboot every few days to keep it happy. I've had other customers with similar complaints. I've had to switch to other access points at times in very busy / noisy marinas. More on this in a future article.
Internet Sources
Starlink
Of course Starlink is part of my internet solution as it is for many boaters today. I use three different Starlink dishes for redundancy and testing. They include:
- Generation 2 rectangular dish - Residential + Portability plan
- Flat High Performance dish - Roam Unlimited plan
- Generation 3 rectangular dish - Roam Unlimited plan
Using three Starlinks might seem a bit excessive, but I don't use them all the time. Underway I use the Flat High Performance dish as it is the best suited for movement. While at anchor, I will use either the generation 2 or generation 3 as they use the least amount of power. While on dock power, I use all three most of the time, because, why not? (ok so maybe I do use them a lot of the time!)
When I'm in important meetings at anchor, I tend to use two of them for redundancy and overall bandwidth increase, especially on the upload side, which is what is used to send my video out to whatever remote meeting I am in.
I manage all three Starlinks using Home Assistant and smart outlet plugs. This allows me to turn on/off combinations of them in different scenarios and save more power than the built-in sleep functionality. Definitely a subject for a future article.
The Residential + Portability plan with the gen2 dish is a great option to have. This is one of the early plans that now allows you to change your address to wherever you are, and has higher priority speeds than the normal Roam plans. I will often update my address to somewhere nearby wherever I am to ensure I have this dish at the highest speeds. There are plenty of times that the standard Roam plan performs very poorly due to what I assume is other Starlink users nearby using lots of the available capacity.
Overall, Starlink continues to be a critical part of staying connected while on the water, even with all of the uncertainty around plans, near-shore and offshore use, and the like.
You can learn more about how to configure Peplink with Starlink in my article below.
Steve Mitchell
Cellular
Cellular still plays a big role in my internet setup, which surprises people sometimes. The main reason I keep it around is redundancy - Starlink is not guaranteed to work all of the time, and in fact, has had outages several times in the last year, just like any other internet provider. Having cellular gives me a backup when Starlink is down so I can continue work and stay connected.
The other big reason I use cellular is upload speeds and packet loss. Video apps like Teams and Zoom use a ton of upload bandwidth to send your video out to other folks in the meeting. Starlink has a pretty small upload capacity, and at times it can suffer from some pretty high packet loss and latency. Starlink on average has about 10Mbps of upload capacity (on a good day), while most cellular connections are in the 50-100Mbps range where I cruise. This is a significant increase if you are in a more populated area where cellular makes sense.
I still firmly believe at least a single cellular connection is essential to anyone who has critical connectivity requirements. Not only does it perform better in certain situations, but in the event of a Starlink outage, it is your backup connection.
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Contact MeWiFi as WAN
This is always a source of internet that I like to have when using a Peplink product. You can read more about how this works in a dedicated article I wrote on WiFi as WAN.
I use this feature when I am at a dock with quality WiFi and want to augment my internet connection. It works very well and provides another way to ensure I have a quality connection. In many cases, it is a backup connection that can swing into action if Starlink or cellular are unavailable.
In some rare cases, the latency is even better than Starlink, and I might even use it as the primary connection while in video meetings, but that doesn't always happen.
Steve Mitchell
Simplified Diagram
Above is a simplified diagram of the entire setup. Red are internet sources, blue are internal networks.
You can see the seven (overkill maybe? 😄) different internet sources including 3x Starlinks, 2x cellular, and 2x WiFi as WAN. There are also two WiFi access points - one outside on the BR2 Pro 5G itself, and one in the AP One AX in the lounge, plus wired ports at the BR2 Pro 5G and a switch in the lounge.
Leveraging Connections
Having all of these internet connections is nice, but you need something to take advantage of them, and for me that is one of the main reasons I use Peplink equipment.
You can switch between the various connections manually when something changes, but that would require that you monitor them frequently. Trying to use two connections at once without a good set of features is also problematic. Peplink has two very similar features that I use to help with this.
SpeedFusion Connect is the most user friendly and provides a way to combine multiple internet connections for redundancy and performance. You can select your entire network, a list of machines, or just specific types of traffic, so it gives you a lot of control over how much of your internet connections you use. This can be important as you may not want everything (think streaming traffic or photo backups, etc.) to use your redundant connections as it might bump into a data cap, or just slow more critical traffic down.
The other feature is to use a VPN to a FusionHub in the cloud. This is essentially the same as SpeedFusion Connect, but requires that you own and run your own FusionHub, and requires a bit more manual configuration. SpeedFusion Connect is a packaged and simplified version of this. I use this version is that it gives me more direct control over certain things, and allows for some additional features for larger downloads and other things I tend to do.
There is quite a bit more to SpeedFusion / PepVPN than just combining internet sources. It can apply logic to the type of connection and its performance and choose to move things around to ensure you have the best experience. There are balancing algorithms that help with latency, congestion, and many other aspects that you can fine tune depending on whether you are playing games, using video applications, streaming, or anything else. You can prioritize specific types of traffic or systems, set aside bandwidth for critical applications, and much more.
You can see from the test results above that there are specific internet sources that are performing better than others. To determine this, you can look at the Rx (recieve/download) and Tx (transmit/upload) columns to determine overall performance or throughput, and the Loss rate (packet loss) and Latency items to determine quality.
In the download test, the cellular and WiFi as WAN connections are actually outperforming Starlink. In the upload test, everything is a bit of a mess with most of the Starlink and WiFi as WAN connections having tons of packet loss, the cellular connections having high latency, and one Starlink - the gen3 - being pretty OK.
SpeedFusion Connect doesn't cost that much - I paid $80 for 2 terabytes of data, which will probably last me 6-9 months. Hosting your own FusionHub will cost a bit more, depending on the configuration you use. Either one is a critical piece in enabling redundant and high quality internet connectivity from a boat, and so far, Peplink has the best features for the price with SpeedFusion Connect.
Results
Not unexpectedly, all of this together has provided a really nice system that has provided high levels of redundancy and reliability while allowing me to stay connected no matter where I am. I have been very impressed with the Peplink BR2 Pro 5G router in particular. I've tested tons of routers over the years, and they all have some annoying problem or reliability issue, and so far, the BR2 has been more reliable than any Peplink product I've tested to date. There are some improvements to be made with the access point situation, but overall this setup has made me happy, and with minor tweaks, will likely continue to do so.
What are you using for your setup? Send me a note or jump into the comments here and let me know!
