Mobile Data/ Internet

Though much easier than even a few years ago, affordable internet still doesn’t feel like a solved problem. Even on a slip, our marina wifi is slow, we needed to come up with mobile internet solutions. Below is what we’ve tried.

Tmobile Home Internet

After trying some of the mobile hotspot based solutions, we used T Mobile Home internet for 2 years. Originally it was very very slow, and then randomly picked up in speed significantly after a year. You’re forced to use their router, of which there are a few variants that you don’t get to choose from. The one we got consumed roughly 10 watts of electricity, which as a continuous power draw is .25kwh per day, or similar to our off grid cooking budget. As that wasn’t sustainable, we used a Shelly 1 Gen 4 switch to turn the internet off and on at night via zigbee Ikea light switches.

While reasonable at $50 per month, Tmobile home internet suffers from high latency and low upload speed (download was actually pretty great). This means that we weren’t able to take video calls from the boat. In order to try to solve this, we purchased a GL.iNet GL-MT3000 travel router, which consumes much less electricity and runs OpenWrt. We’ve used OpenWrt before, but were specifically interested in it for it’s Smart Queue Management feature to see if we could get the latency down in combination with the Bufferbloat test. It helped, but calls were still too slow and we ended up working in coworking spaces to take video calls.

When coworking got too cumbersome, we upgraded to Starlink mini when it went on sale for $300 instead of $500. Initially this was really exciting, but we then realized the Starlink mini doesn’t work with their “Residential” plans. You are forced into their “Roam” plan which is $165 per month. If you would like to use the $80 residential in the US, you need to purchase the regular Starlink dish. The issue with this is that the regular Starlink dish consumes vastly more power, are much larger, require their router, and can’t be powered via USB C or DC power (without a converter). Unless using it for short periods, running the regular Starlink dish off grid is unsustainable and a bit of a sailing hazard.

Though the price was much more expensive, we ended up keeping the mini, and use it in combination with cellular. We try to stay at the 50 GB per month plan, but often splurge on the unlimited plan and ignore solar. While it works well, powering off 12v is really finicky. Originally we tried to power via USB C from our Scanstrut SC-USB-03 that was already installed. Though the mini only uses 25 watts on average, startup is much higher and the output was too from the Scanstrut. We then switched to a dedicated Starlink cord bought off Amazon with the highest AWG we could find. The voltage drop from this was too high however on 12v, and the the mini now cycled off and on. Eventually we used 12 AWG wire and spliced on the Starlink plug from the amazon cable to get it working. If running 24v or higher, this is probably less of a concern.

For mounting we use a Starlink Mini Ram Mount which attaches to the radar pole with a medium ram mount arm (neither large nor small worked well). We are luckily to live and cruise in places that are very safe, but when leaving for a long time, this system allows us to take the Starlink Mini down relatively easily. When putting it back up, it’s a little finicky again with the alignment, so we try not to take it down often. This mount has been secure for costal cruising, but we’ll probably take it down for offshore or rough conditions.

Travel Routers

While the products above include a router, it’s still valuable to have a travel router for managing Home Assistant and other software that’s independent of these routers. When deciding on our router, we looked at the “Cudy TR3000” and the “GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX)” which are both small travel routers with small power draws. The Cudy is cheaper and probably fine after you flash new firmware on, but there is less documentation and support. It also can’t download OpenWrt packages without flashing new firmware. For $20 more at the time, we decided to pay for the convenience and support and it’s worked out fine. Gl Inet also has a newer device in the “Slate 7” but we didn’t need any of those features and it drew more power. As for the cheaper “Opal”, it again didn’t support plugins without flashing firmware.