Starlink Retired Global Roam. The 30-Day Cap Changes the Circumnavigation Math.
On August 17, Global Roam died and Roam Unlimited shrank to 30 days abroad at a time. For a family boat that will not fly home every month, that is not a pricing tweak. It is a plan rewrite. Here is how I am re-speccing Starlink for a circumnavigation with four kids.
In the Iridium piece from August 27, I wrote that Starlink would carry 95% of our bits, and that the failure mode that worried me most was not the satellites. It was the terms changing mid-Pacific, by email, from an office in Texas.
That email arrived on schedule.
On August 17, Starlink discontinued Global Roam for existing customers. The same day, Roam Unlimited — the $175-a-month plan I had budgeted as the sane answer for a family cruising boat was cut from up to 60 days of international use per trip down to 30. Return to your registered home country (or the US/Canada grouping, or the European one) and the clock resets. Stay abroad longer and you upgrade to a Priority plan, localize the account to a new country, or go dark.
We live in Bend. The boat we are researching does not. A circumnavigation is not a road trip with a free return flight every 29 days. The plan I wrote on a worksheet in May no longer matches the plan SpaceX is selling in September.
What actually changed
Three moves, not one.
First, Global Roam is gone. It was the unadvertised unlimited-international option — roughly $400 a month by the end — and Starlink told existing customers to switch to Global Priority before August 17 or lose the service. New customers lost it earlier, on July 15.
Second, Roam Unlimited kept the price and lost the duration. Thirty consecutive days outside your home country or grouped region, then a hard choice. US and Canada count as one region, which helps Baja hoppers who never leave that block. Mexico is not in the block. Neither is the Caribbean. Neither is French Polynesia. For a US-registered account on a Pacific crossing, day 31 is a problem you have to solve from the boat.
Third, Ocean Mode — the metered add-on that turns the dish into usable open-ocean coverage beyond about 12 nautical miles — is tripling. Roam Unlimited stays at $2 per GB through September 26, then jumps to $6 per GB on September 27. That is not a rounding error on an 18-day Galápagos-to-Nuku Hiva rehearsal. It is the difference between a weather-and-email budget and a line item that starts to look like a second Iridium plan.
Travel Registration is also required for international use on Roam: identity, planned travel, the usual. It does not remove the 30-day cap. It just confirms you are the person holding the account before the clock starts.
The Personal Maritime patch
Late August, after the cruising forums did what cruising forums do, Starlink started offering a new plan to accounts that had already used the service at sea: Personal Maritime, $185 a month.
What it buys, if you qualify: unlimited data in territorial waters worldwide, and no 30-day international travel limit of the Roam kind. What it does not buy: land use (explicitly prohibited), and free open ocean. Beyond roughly 12 nautical miles you still turn on Ocean Mode, now at $6 per GB. Starlink also wants vessel paperwork — name, flag, length overall, a unique ID, a registration copy — and the plan is not on the public shop page. You get there through support, or through an invite email.
The length line moved once already. The first terms used 40 feet as the example of a prohibited yacht; on September 4 that example became 60 feet. That matters for the 50-foot cats on our worksheet. It does not mean the rule is settled. Starlink's own language still reads like an example, not a statute, and early approvals for boats over the old limit were inconsistent. I am treating Personal Maritime as the working assumption for a family boat under 60 feet that lives on the water between countries — and I am not treating the length rule as finished business.
Inland waterways, Great Lakes, marinas, a haul-out yard: the terms talk about territorial waters and stay quiet about the rest. Roam used to say inland waterways out loud. Personal Maritime does not. Until that is clear, a boat that winters on the Intracoastal and summers in the islands may still be swapping plans at the dock.
How I am rewriting the stack
The three-layer stack from the August 27 piece still holds. The Starlink layer just got more specific.
Coastal and island hopping, months abroad: Personal Maritime is the plan I am pricing, not Roam Unlimited. Ten dollars more a month buys the thing Roam no longer sells — staying out of the US without resetting a travel clock. For a family of six who will spend whole seasons in Mexico, the Eastern Caribbean, or the Societies, that is the product.
Open-ocean passages: Ocean Mode at $6 per GB, used the way I already planned to use the dish — morning weather-and-email block, evening kids' calls, off overnight. Metered and scheduled, not left on. At the new rate, roughly 10 GB of Ocean Mode on Personal Maritime puts the month near what a small Global Priority bucket costs; more than that and Priority starts looking rational for the passage months alone. I will not pretend the open-ocean bill is still the bargain it was at $2 per GB.
The day the terms change again, or the dish goes dark: still the Iridium GO! exec and the EPIRB. Nothing in August made that less true. If anything, August made the thesis cheaper to defend. The primary system just demonstrated, on a calendar, that the contract can move under a boat mid-season.
What I am not doing: budgeting Roam Unlimited as if Global Roam never existed and the 30-day cap is a footnote. It is not a footnote. It is the difference between a plan that fits a circumnavigation and a plan that fits a long vacation.
The Galápagos test
I keep coming back to the same 2,965-mile leg. Eighteen days, sailed the way you sail with four kids — reefed at night, no heroics. By the time we untie from Puerto Ayora we will already have been outside the US/Canada grouping for months. Roam Unlimited's 30-day clock is not a tool for that passage. It is a trap for anyone who treated Starlink like a set-and-forget utility.
Personal Maritime gets the boat through territorial waters on either end without the home-country reset. The middle is Ocean Mode, watched like a fuel gauge. The weather files I will not skip still have a path that does not depend on Starlink's account standing — that is what the Iridium layer is for. The kids' video calls with grandparents can wait for the next anchorage. The four GRIB lines before we leave cannot.
What I am buying when we buy
Hardware first: a Flat High Performance dish for a boat that moves. Then the account, pointed at Personal Maritime once we have a hull under 60 feet and registration papers Starlink will accept. Roam Unlimited stays useful for US/Canada coastal seasons and for shakedown months before we leave the grouping. It is no longer the circumnavigation plan.
If you are starting from scratch on the consumer side, this is the door I would use — hardware and a consumer Roam or Residential activation through the referral, then the support ticket for Personal Maritime once the boat exists:
I am not recommending Global Priority as the default for a cruising family. It is the commercial escape hatch when Ocean Mode math or international duration stops making sense on the consumer plans. I am also not recommending you drop the second satellite system because Starlink published a maritime SKU. Personal Maritime is still an account. Accounts have terms. Terms change.
Disclosure: that Starlink link is a referral link. If you order through it, Bluewater Navigator may earn a credit toward service. It does not change what you pay for the hardware or the plan, and it is the only Starlink URL I am putting in this piece.
