Starlink Solved Offshore Comms. Here's Why I'm Still Paying for Iridium.

In May, Starlink quietly raised its Roam Unlimited plan from $165 to $175 a month and added a new 300 GB tier that doesn't include Ocean Mode. Ten dollars is nothing. What the change actually told me is the thing I keep circling on the comms line of our budget: the best communications system ever put on a cruising boat is also the only one whose terms can change mid-Pacific, by email, from an office in Texas.

That's not a reason to skip Starlink. We'll have it aboard, and it will carry 95% of our bits. It's a reason to think of offshore communications the way I think about a portfolio: the headline asset gets the attention, and the boring, uncorrelated position is what saves you. For the 50-foot cat we're researching, I've landed on a three-layer stack, and the layer I expect to use least is the one I've spent the most time speccing.

What Starlink actually costs offshore in 2026

The plan structure has settled into two real options for a cruising boat. Roam Unlimited at $175/month now works worldwide — the old home-continent restriction is gone — and you add Ocean Mode when you're making passages beyond coastal coverage. Coverage within 200 nautical miles of the continental US is effectively complete, and the North Atlantic trade-wind routes are well served. The second option, Global Priority, is the commercial-grade tier: roughly $150/month just for terminal access, then priority data on top, built for vessels that need guaranteed performance anywhere. For a family cruising boat, Roam plus Ocean Mode is the sane answer; Global Priority is for boats with charter guests or a captain whose job depends on the uplink.

Hardware is the cheap part. A Flat High Performance dish is the right unit for a boat that moves — the standard dish works at anchor but isn't rated for in-motion use — and you're into it for well under what a single mid-tier chartplotter costs. Call the whole first year, hardware plus Roam Unlimited plus a few months of Ocean Mode on passage legs, something like $3,000–3,500. Fifteen years ago a fraction of that capability was a $30,000 dome and a four-figure monthly bill. This is the greatest bargain in cruising, which is exactly why it's worth being clear-eyed about what it doesn't cover.

The power bill nobody puts in the brochure

A Flat High Performance dish draws something like 50–75 watts in normal operation, more in heavy rain when it's working harder. Run it around the clock and that's 1.2–1.8 kWh a day — call it 100–150 amp-hours at 12 volts. On our planned boat that's a third to a half of what I've budgeted for the entire house load excluding refrigeration. It's more than the watermaker on a typical day.

You have three ways to deal with that. Add solar — 400 extra watts of panel, realistically, to cover the dish in the tropics with margin for cloudy days. Add lithium — another 200 Ah of Victron-class storage so overnight draw doesn't eat your reserve. Or do what I suspect most cruising families actually do: schedule it. Dish on for a morning weather-and-email block, on again in the evening for the kids' calls with grandparents, off overnight and on passage watches. That cuts the draw by two-thirds and costs nothing but discipline.

I'm planning the schedule approach with the solar margin anyway, because the failure mode of "we sized the electrical system assuming the dish stays off" is a family that slowly stops turning it off. Budget the power for the way you'll actually live, not the way you promise yourself you'll live.

Why I'm still paying for Iridium

Here's the uncomfortable list I made before deciding to carry a second satellite system. Starlink can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the satellites working: a lightning strike takes out the dish or the router; the account gets suspended over a billing hiccup you can't resolve without internet; the terms change — geofencing, plan rules, Ocean Mode conditions — while you're mid-ocean; or the dish simply dies and the nearest replacement is 2,000 miles downwind. Every one of those has happened to a cruising boat somewhere. None of them is likely. All of them together are likely enough that I won't cross an ocean with four kids and a single uplink.

The backup is an Iridium GO! exec. It's slow — think weather files and text, not video calls — but it runs on the Iridium constellation, which has true pole-to-pole coverage and a 25-year record of just working. Plans run from about $109/month for 25 MB up to roughly $198/month for unlimited data on an annual commitment, and the unit itself is around $1,300. PredictWind's integration is the part that matters to me: GRIB downloads, weather routing, tracking, and departure planning all work natively over it, so the backup isn't just an emergency phone — it's a complete, independent weather workflow.

My plan is to run it on a minimal plan year-round and step up to the bigger data tier for the months we're on major passage legs. Averaged out, call it $1,500–2,000 a year. That's real money to spend on a device I hope stays in its Pelican case. It's also about 1% of our annual cruising budget to guarantee that a router failure never becomes a decision about whether we can safely continue a 3,000-mile leg. I price a lot of insurance in my day job. This is cheap insurance.

There's a medical dimension to this for us, too. With four kids aboard, the telemedicine plan I wrote about when I built our offshore medical kit assumes we can reach a physician with a photo and a description within hours, anywhere. Starlink makes that trivial. But the whole point of a medical protocol is that it works on the worst day, and the worst day is exactly when systems fail in clusters — the squall that split someone's forehead may be the same squall soaking the dish's power run. Voice over Iridium, slow and crackly, still gets a pediatrician on the line from the middle of the Pacific. That call is the actual product I'm buying; the weather files are just what the subscription does the other 364 days.

The safety layer is not the internet layer

The third layer isn't about data at all, and it's a mistake to let the first two blur into it. When things go genuinely wrong, I don't want anything that depends on an app, an account in good standing, or a charged tablet. So the safety layer is boring and old: a Category 1 EPIRB hard-mounted and hydrostatically released, a Garmin inReach Mini 2 in the ditch bag with its own subscription, personal AIS beacons on the offshore lifejackets, and the DSC-equipped VHF that every boat already has. The inReach runs about $400 for the unit and $15–65 a month depending on plan; the EPIRB is roughly $500 with no subscription at all.

The reasoning is separation of failure modes. Starlink and Iridium share one: they're both accounts, with billing and terms and software. The EPIRB shares nothing with anything. It has a battery, a 406 MHz transmitter, and a treaty-backed international rescue system on the other end. When I hear cruisers say Starlink means they can drop the EPIRB, I hear someone who has confused bandwidth with redundancy.

What the stack costs, all-in

Putting numbers on the whole thing for our boat:

• Starlink — Flat High Performance hardware, Roam Unlimited at $175/month, Ocean Mode on passage months: ~$3,200 first year, ~$2,400/year after.
• Iridium GO! exec — hardware ~$1,300, blended service ~$1,800/year.
• Safety layer — EPIRB, inReach Mini 2 + plan, two AIS beacons: ~$1,800 up front, ~$400/year.
• Power support — the extra solar attributable to comms: ~$1,200 once.

Roughly $7,500 in year one and $4,600 a year after that, before the power system upgrades you'd partly want anyway. Against a year-one cruising budget in the $170,000 range for a family of six, comms is about 4% — less than insurance, less than the maintenance reserve, more than I'd have guessed before I priced it honestly. The number that surprised me most wasn't Starlink's subscription. It was that the redundancy layers cost nearly as much as the primary, and that I'm entirely comfortable with that ratio.

Where this lands

If I'm right about the shape of this, the comms conversation among cruising families is about to invert. For twenty years the hard question was how to get any usable data offshore, and the answer consumed whole chapters of cruising guides. That problem is solved. The new hard questions are quieter: how much power you'll really feed the dish, what happens the day it goes dark, and whether your safety chain has an account number anywhere in it. Boats will get those answers wrong precisely because the primary system works so well that the failure case starts to feel theoretical.

Next step on our end: I'm adding a line to the worksheet for dedicated comms power budget, because after running these numbers I don't think I can evaluate a boat's electrical system without it. And when we do the Galapagos to Nuku Hiva leg I keep rehearsing, the GO! exec will be doing the weather work at least one day in three — not because Starlink will have failed, but because a backup you never exercise isn't a backup. It's a talisman.