I was working with a maritime brand that used cellular service to connect its boats to the internet and the corporate office. The boats worked the Mississippi River, and that specificity matters, because once you understand the Mississippi, you understand the problem.
In New Orleans, or any metro area along the river, my cell coverage was solid. The boats connected. Everything functioned reasonably well. Never great, but reasonably well, we were pushing a lot of traffic and a lot of people through one or two cellular connections, and it worked. But I needed more.
Here’s what most people don’t realize about the Mississippi River: between the cities, there is nothing. Miles of agricultural land. Rural stretches where the population density drops to near zero. And where you have fewer people, carriers like AT&T and Verizon don’t build infrastructure to serve those areas.
Same problem I’d seen on cruise ships. Cell phones work great near a port. In the middle of the river, or the middle of the ocean,you’re on your own.
Some of these boats would spend 12 to 36 hours in stretches with zero to 10 megabits of connectivity. There were known dead zones where we couldn’t remotely fix anything, we’d just have to wait until the boat reached the next city the following morning. That was my reality, and I had to fix it.
Enter Starlink
Starlink was starting to make noise. A couple thousand dollars per unit, versus tens of thousands for traditional maritime satellite. C-band service or Inmarsat could cost thousands of dollars per gigabyte. Starlink was hundreds. if it worked.
We ran a test phase. Starlink received FCC approval for mobile use. But here’s where it got interesting: the approval was for mobile use within the inland United States. We weren’t completely sure it covered waterways.
My read: the Mississippi River is inside the land of the United States. That seemed close enough.
Working with a vendor, we placed multiple Starlink maritime units on a test boat. The entire project took about a month. We were ready for the seasonal maiden voyage, the first cruise of the season,and the big reveal.
Two Weeks on the River
I was asked to personally be on board to make sure it worked. I was 90% confident we got it right. That other 10% could have been really bad.
Here was my math: either I was about to have a two-week semi-vacation because everything worked and I could sit back and watch, or I was about to spend two weeks explaining why I did this and why it didn’t work.
So I did what anyone should do. I called the vendor and said: if I’m riding this boat for two weeks to make sure your product works, so are you.
The CEO said he’d unfortunately be in Europe that week. He sent his Senior VP of Sales instead. Good enough. We both rode the boat.
Much to my surprise, actually, I wasn’t surprised. Much to my relief is more accurate. It worked exactly as planned.
I went from connectivity gaps lasting hours, sometimes an entire day,to over two gigabits of bandwidth on almost every speed test I ran.
For those of you paying close attention: how did I see a two-gigabit speed test if the ship’s network only had a one-gigabit connection? I ran multiple speed tests from multiple devices simultaneously and added the numbers together. The WAN throughput from Starlink actually exceeded the capacity of the ship’s local network. I had more bandwidth from the sky than I had at any single location on land.
The Numbers
The good: I finally fixed a connectivity problem that had existed since the inception of this river cruise concept. Average speeds went from 50-100 Mbps on cellular (when it worked at all) to over two gigabits, consistently. The dead zones were gone.
The cost: about $10,000 a month, compared to traditional maritime satellite that would have been closer to $40,000+ a month. I saved money and solved the problem.
The impact was immediate. Corporate staff could now be on our own boats and take meetings. For the first time, we had office-grade speed and connectivity 24/7.
One of the crew members cried when she told me she could talk to her daughter on FaceTime every night after her shift ended. That’s when I knew we did it right.
I pushed to upgrade the onboard Wi-Fi next, so we could deliver that bandwidth to every corner of every vessel and eventually resell access to guests. I didn’t close it. The boats had 2 gigabits falling from the sky and not every corner of the ship could use it. Was that an IT problem or a business decision? Honestly, some of both.