Peplink maritime networking for yachts, commercial vessels and offshore

Networking that holds at sea

Cellular, Starlink and shore Wi-Fi, bonded into one connection that stays up when any single link drops.

Maritime Connectivity Built on Peplink Hardware

Reliable networking for vessels, yachts, and commercial craft. Cellular bonding, Starlink integration, IP67 hardware, 12V/24V power tolerance.

The connectivity problem no generic router solves

A vessel at sea has exactly three options for internet access: cellular, satellite, and shore Wi-Fi. In practice, you use all three. The challenge is not which one to pick. The challenge is keeping the network alive when one link goes away mid-crossing, when cellular coverage drops off the coast of Brittany at 0200, or when Starlink loses lock during a squall.

Generic routers fail here in predictable ways. They will switch between WAN connections, but that switch drops sessions. Every active TCP connection, every VoIP call, every SCADA poll times out and has to restart. On a commercial vessel, that is not an inconvenience. It is an operational failure.

Peplink solves this with SpeedFusion bonding. The bonded tunnel keeps sessions alive across link transitions. Traffic flows across whatever combination of cellular and satellite is currently available, and the handover is invisible to applications. That is what makes Peplink the standard in broadcast, maritime, and mobile defence deployments. It is not marketing. It is what the technology actually does.

We have been deploying these systems in the field for fifteen years. Offshore broadcast units, working fishing vessels, charter yachts, maritime emergency services. This page documents what we recommend and why.

What we recommend, by use case

Sail yacht or motor cruiser (single owner, weekend and coastal passage use)

Recommended hardware: MAX BR1 Mini 5G + Mobility 22G antenna

The BR1 Mini 5G is the right starting point for a private yacht. Single 5G modem, global band coverage, dual SIM slots, compact form factor that fits behind a chart table panel. It will handle cellular from port entry to about 20nm offshore on most UK and European coastlines.

Pair it with a Mobility 22G surface-mount antenna. The Mobility series is specifically designed for vehicle and vessel mounting. Low profile, UV-stabilised housing, SMA connectors that do not corrode. The 22G covers LTE and 5G across the frequency ranges you will encounter in UK, Northern European, and Mediterranean waters.

Hardware from £509 (router) + £199 (antenna). Accessories and cabling additional. PrimeCare included in the router price.

If you want Starlink as a secondary WAN for offshore passages, the BR1 Mini 5G supports an Ethernet WAN input. Wire your Starlink dish into the WAN port and configure SpeedFusion Cloud. The BR1 Mini then manages cellular as primary and Starlink as secondary, failing over automatically and holding your sessions intact during the transition. For the antenna integration, the Antenna MAX S bundles cellular plus a dedicated Starlink Mini passthrough into a single IP67 enclosure.

Charter yacht or commercial sailing vessel (paying guests, full season, permanent connectivity requirement)

Recommended hardware: MAX BR2 Pro 5G

The BR2 Pro is a dual-modem 5G router in a compact form factor. Two independent 5G modems, each with its own SIM pair, allow you to run two different carriers simultaneously. This is the correct architecture for a charter vessel: SIM one on EE or Vodafone for UK/Ireland, SIM two on a roaming data plan for European waters. SpeedFusion bonds both links, and your guests never see the transition as the vessel moves between carrier coverage zones.

It also supports Ethernet WAN for Starlink or VSAT integration. The BR2 Pro's 1Gbps router throughput headroom means you are not the bottleneck when 8 guests are streaming simultaneously.

From £2,719 RRP. If this is for a commercial vessel requiring a full installation specification, contact us for a configuration quote.

Superyacht, commercial vessel, or fleet operator

Recommended hardware: MAX HD1 Dome Pro 5G + shore-side Balance for fleet management

The HD1 Dome Pro is a self-contained outdoor unit. 5G modem, Wi-Fi 6 access point, and a weatherproof IP67 housing in a single dome that mounts directly to a mast or superstructure. No separate antenna runs. No interior router enclosure. The Ethernet run from dome to switch is the only cable.

For fleet operators managing multiple vessels, InControl2 cloud management (included with PrimeCare) gives you a single dashboard showing the cellular and WAN status of every unit in your fleet, in real time. You can push configuration changes, firmware updates, and SpeedFusion policies fleet-wide from a browser.

From £2,619 RRP. For fleet deployments with five or more vessels, contact us for volume pricing and fleet management architecture.

SpeedFusion bonding in a maritime context

SpeedFusion is Peplink's bonding and failover technology. It creates an encrypted tunnel between the router on the vessel and a FusionHub endpoint (either Peplink's cloud service, or a server you control). All traffic rides inside that tunnel, across every active WAN link simultaneously.

The result is threefold:

Bonding. If you have 30Mbps cellular and 100Mbps Starlink active simultaneously, SpeedFusion can aggregate both. Download sessions use both links in parallel. This is not load balancing with session stickiness. It is genuine packet-level bonding.

WAN Smoothing. SpeedFusion can forward duplicate packets across multiple links and discard the copy that arrives second. In practice, this eliminates packet loss events caused by temporary cellular degradation. A video call over a cellular link in marginal coverage becomes stable, because the WAN Smoothing mode absorbs the loss spikes before they reach the application layer.

Hot Failover. If a WAN link fails completely, SpeedFusion holds active sessions open across the tunnel while it reconstructs routing over the remaining links. TCP connections do not drop. This is the feature that matters most on a commercial vessel where a dropped connection to a payment terminal or a chart service causes operational problems.

SpeedFusion is included in the hardware. A FusionHub licence (for a self-hosted endpoint) or SpeedFusion Cloud subscription are separate. For most marine deployments we recommend SpeedFusion Cloud: Peplink operates the endpoints, and you pay per GB rather than managing infrastructure.

What we deploy ourselves

The engineering team at The Tech Factory has installed Peplink hardware on:

Offshore broadcast units operating from vessels up to 60nm from shore, live-feeding HD video over bonded cellular with no satellite uplink
Working fishing vessels requiring AIS data, vessel management, and crew communication over 4G
Charter yachts crossing the Channel and the Bay of Biscay with continuous SpeedFusion connections maintained across UK, French, and Spanish carrier coverage
Ribs and small commercial craft where the installation had to survive salt water immersion and 12V supply voltage variation

This is not a theoretical product selection. It is what we have observed to work in conditions that test the hardware.

Sector-specific installation details

IP67 enclosures and deck/cockpit installation. The IP67 rating on the HD1 Dome Pro is not a marketing claim. IP67 means the enclosure is dustproof and can survive temporary immersion to one metre. For cockpit or deck installation on a yacht, this matters. The alternative is running everything below deck with an external antenna and accepting the cable penetrations and antenna loss that entails. An HD1 Dome Pro mounted to a stern arch gives you the electronics below and the antenna at height, in a unit that will not fail from a wave breaking over the cockpit.

12V and 24V power supply. Most Peplink routers accept a wide DC input range. The BR1 Mini 5G and BR2 Pro accept 9-36V DC. The HD1 Dome Pro is PoE-powered via its Ethernet run; the onboard PoE injector or switch must supply IEEE 802.3bt if you want full performance. Verify your switch output before installation; we can advise on suitable injectors.

NMEA 0183 and vessel data integration. If you need to integrate AIS or NMEA data streams from navigation instruments into the network, that is handled at the switch and application layer, not the router. The router provides the connectivity; a serial-to-Ethernet converter handles NMEA. We can specify the right architecture if you have this requirement.

Antenna mounting on aluminium and composite hulls. Cellular signal penetrates fibreglass well. Aluminium hulls attenuate cellular signals significantly and require external antenna placement. On an aluminium vessel, a masthead or pushpit-mounted Mobility 22G or Antenna MAX is not optional. If you have an aluminium hull, raise this at the configuration stage and we will ensure the antenna placement is correct before you purchase.

SIM card procurement. We do not supply SIM cards, but we can advise on carrier selection by route. For UK and European coastal passages, a combination of a UK carrier with EU roaming included and a dedicated EU data SIM provides better coverage diversity than relying on a single roaming arrangement. For offshore Atlantic work, a satellite data service (Starlink or Iridium Certus) as a backup WAN is the only reliable architecture.

Start the conversation

If you are specifying a marine installation, we want to understand the vessel type, the use case (private, charter, commercial, research), the route profile, and the power and mounting constraints before we recommend hardware. A five-minute call saves the installation delays that come from specifying the wrong product.

Fifteen minutes. No slides. We will tell you what you need and what you do not.