Wild WorkationStarlink vs 4G at sea: which one you should actually rely on
A head-to-head from three seasons of running both — speed, latency, cost, power, and the specific moments where each one wins.
People arrive on the boat assuming Starlink has settled this argument. It has not — it has just moved it. Starlink is the better connection in the places where 4G does not exist, and the worse connection in most of the places where it does. Here is the head-to-head, based on running both side by side for three seasons on the Turkish, Croatian and Greek coasts.
The comparison, line by line
| Dimension | Starlink | Coastal 4G/5G |
|---|---|---|
| Download | 100–250 Mbps | 30–60 Mbps |
| Upload | 10–30 Mbps | 15–25 Mbps |
| Latency | 30–60 ms | 25–45 ms |
| Jitter / dropouts | 1–5 s re-acquisition, a few times an hour | Rare near shore; degrades gradually with distance |
| Coverage | Almost anywhere, including offshore | Within ~15–20 km of a populated coast |
| Monthly cost | €200–300+ (ocean-capable plan) | €15–30 (50–100 GB local SIM) |
| Power draw | 40–75 W continuous | 2–5 W for a MiFi hotspot |
| Setup | Dish, mount, cabling, plan management | Buy a SIM on arrival |
Look at the upload row for a moment, because it is the one that surprises everybody. Coastal 4G uploads at broadly the same rate as Starlink, at a twentieth of the cost and a twentieth of the power. If your work is screen-sharing, pushing code and sending files rather than pulling large data down, the expensive connection buys you very little near shore.
Where 4G actually wins
- Live video calls near shore. Lower jitter and no re-acquisition stutter means the call does not freeze mid-sentence.
- Anything interactive — SSH, remote desktop, live collaborative editing — where a two-second freeze is worse than a slower connection.
- Cost and power. A hotspot runs for days on a power bank; a Starlink dish is a permanent draw on the house batteries.
- Setup time. You can be online twenty minutes after landing, with no hardware to mount.
Where Starlink actually wins
- Out of cell range. Open-water crossings, remote island chains, the far side of an uninhabited coast — here 4G is not slower, it is absent.
- Bulk transfer. A multi-gigabyte upload or a large dataset pull finishes in minutes rather than an hour.
- A boat full of people. Eight simultaneous workers saturate a single 4G cell far sooner than they saturate a dish.
- Predictability across a route. It does not matter which bay you anchor in; the connection is broadly the same.
Which one for which job
| Task | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A client or board call near shore | 4G | Consistency beats headline speed; no satellite stutter |
| A standup at anchor in a remote bay | Starlink | Usually the only connection available |
| Pushing code, reviewing PRs | Either | Both have ample upload; latency difference is invisible |
| Uploading 5 GB of footage | Starlink | Finishes in minutes rather than most of an hour |
| Working during an open-sea crossing | Starlink | 4G is out of range |
| Evening in a marina | 4G | Marina Wi-Fi is congested; Starlink is off to save batteries |
The honest verdict
If you are chartering a coastal week in Turkey or Croatia, a local SIM is the connection you will actually use, and Starlink is a nice-to-have that mostly sits there. If your route leaves cell range — Greek island-hops, Thailand, anything offshore — Starlink stops being optional. Either way, the boats that never have an internet problem run both and can switch in under a minute. That redundancy, not the brand on the dish, is what makes a working week at sea feel normal.
Questions from readers
The questions this guide gets asked most often. Expand any to read the answer.
Only sometimes. Starlink is far faster on download and works out of cell range, but near shore 4G has lower jitter, no satellite re-acquisition dropouts, similar upload speed, and costs about a twentieth as much. Near shore, 4G is usually the better connection for live calls.
Coastal 4G, when you have it. Video calls care about consistency more than peak speed, and Starlink drops for 1–5 seconds when the dish re-acquires a satellite. Out of cell range, Starlink is the only option and handles 1080p calls fine.
Roughly an order of magnitude. A local prepaid SIM with 50–100 GB costs €15–30 a month; an ocean-capable Starlink plan is €200–300 or more, before the cost of the dish itself.
On a working boat, yes — but mostly for redundancy rather than capability. Two independent connections with a fast way to switch between them is what stops a dropped link from becoming a dropped meeting.
Along populated coasts, yes, and better than people expect — coastal towers sit on hills and open water blocks nothing. Usable range is roughly 15–20 km offshore, further with an external antenna on a MiFi router.
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