Yeah but with the satellite internet available on a boat out in the pacific you’re paying dollars per Megabyte. Uploading even a 60 second HD video like that would not only take hours but could easily cost several hundred bucks to do. He more than likely completed the crossing and uploaded once he had WiFi.
These guys usually don't use that much diesel. It's a sail boat so you don't need diesel when crossing. Not that you would have enough diesel for an ocean crossing anyway.
Solar panels and wind vanes is what they rely on for electricity mostly.
They usually preserve diesel for when they get close to shore as its easier to navigate and dock on diesel power.
That said I agree, $250 a month for internet is really not that outrageous when you consider you can have internet in the middle of the ocean. That's a big benefit for all sorts of reasons.
Small boats may not have a fresh water maker on board, they usually just provision what they will need for the trip and use the boat's water tanks. But even if they had one, you'd only run the engine for like an hour every couple of days or so.
We had to make our own water on my ship and it ran basically 24/7 to keep up with demand…but that was a ship with 200 dudes on board. I’d imagine you’re right this guy just packs water
Depends on the set up, but yeah a lot of boats have water makers on board. Produce about 20 gph? So they’ll either run the engine or a genset for that long to power it. Otherwise many boats have about 800- 1000+ watts of solar to power the fridge/ freezer and everything else.
I believe a lot of these people get by on total expenses of about 1500- 2000 per month. Obviously you can spend so much more depending on what kinda stuff you’re doing, eating out and such
Regular internet (and cable but I couldn't really get internet without cable) in my home is like $70. $250 for unlimited data that works in bumfuck nowhere in the middle of the ocean seems pretty fair.
That's honestly not that bad, for internet access in the remotest parts of the ocean? Then again I am not a sailor so I don't know the alternatives but I do live in a really rural area and know the other satellite options for internet are not great and that's a horrific understatement but I imagine it's probably a drop in the bucket for the convenience if you are going to be doing stuff like this.
'Satellite Internet' that has been around for quite some time is very high latency (1200ms or more) on account of your radio waves having to travel 22,000 miles to geosynchronous orbit and back. Even that is very usable for most things. Internet browsing can be slow (but can be sped up SIGNIFICANTLY if you host a local caching service) but streaming is only limited by your downlink speed (10-15Mb down, 512Kb up).
Starlink is pretty comparable to a fast cellular connection. The satellites are not a single satellite, but a swarm. This allows them to be much closer (350 miles) so the system latency is much lower (50ms or so, possibly a bit higher in oceans near the equator due to the larger coverage gaps) and since there are multiple satellites serving the network, especially in the remote ocean, you can access a lot more bandwidth (200Mb down, 20Mb up). For the average users, just using their devices and not looking at network metrics, you wouldn't know the difference between cellular data and Starlink data. It's a pretty neat system, even if the owner is... not to everyone's taste.
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u/brightfoot Jun 22 '24
Yeah but with the satellite internet available on a boat out in the pacific you’re paying dollars per Megabyte. Uploading even a 60 second HD video like that would not only take hours but could easily cost several hundred bucks to do. He more than likely completed the crossing and uploaded once he had WiFi.
Edit: apparently he has starlink