If you spend any time in cruising Facebook groups, WhatsApp fleets or anchorage sundowner conversations, you already know the topic of the month: Starlink changed the rules, and the world-cruising community is not happy. We're writing this from Fiji, where our own Starlink dish has powered four seasons of weather routing, video calls home and remote work — so this one is personal for us too. Here's what actually changed, stripped of the panic, and what it genuinely means if you're cruising now or planning to cast off soon.
Everything below is accurate as at late August 2026. Starlink changes plans and prices frequently and per-country — always confirm against your own account before making decisions.
The three changes that matter
1. Global Roam is gone. The plan that made borderless cruising simple — roughly US$400 a month for unlimited-ish data anywhere — closed to new customers on 15 July 2026 and was switched off for existing customers on 17 August 2026. If you were on it, you've already been migrated or asked to choose something else.
2. Roam Unlimited now stops at 30 days abroad. The mainstream cruiser plan still gives you unlimited data in the country where your account is registered, but use outside that home country is now capped at 30 consecutive days — down from the 60 days most of us planned passages around. After 30 days you're pushed to upgrade, move your account, or go home.
3. Ocean-legal data now means Priority pricing. The upgrade path is Global Priority, which starts around US$250 a month for 50GB and climbs to US$650 for 500GB, with tiers up to 2TB. Unlike Roam, this data is "bucketed": burn through your block and you're throttled to roughly 1 Mbps until you top up. There's also a cheaper Local Priority tier (from about US$55 for 50GB), but it's designated for use on land — not coastal or ocean use — and there are signs Starlink intends to enforce that distinction more strictly than the old, largely un-policed coastal rules.
What this looks like in real numbers
| Plan | Indicative price (USD) | Data | Where it works | The catch for cruisers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roam Unlimited | ~$95–$165/mo depending on registered country | Unlimited | Home country + 30 days/visit abroad | The 30-day clock — the whole problem |
| Local Priority | From ~$55/mo for 50GB | Metered blocks | Registered country, land use | Not for coastal or ocean use |
| Global Priority | $250/mo (50GB) to $650/mo (500GB)+ | Metered blocks | Worldwide, including ocean | Price, and throttling when the block runs out |
| Global Roam | ~$400/mo | Unlimited-ish | Worldwide | Discontinued 17 August 2026 |
To put the sting in context: a boat that streamed, worked and video-called its way through 300GB a month on Roam Unlimited for around a hundred dollars now faces a Global Priority bill in the many hundreds for the same usage — or a game of 30-day hopscotch with its account registration.
The fine print that softens (or sharpens) the blow
Regions, not just countries. Starlink groups some markets. The US and Canada count as one home region, and Europe is grouped into one region of 35-plus countries — so a Europe-registered boat can cruise the Med all season without ever starting the 30-day clock. There is, pointedly, no equivalent grouping for the South Pacific: Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu and New Zealand are all separate markets, so an island-hopping season here trips the clock in a way a Greek-islands summer doesn't.
The clock resets at home. Return to your registered country and your 30-day allowance resets for the next trip. Useful for NZ boats doing a single winter season in Fiji; useless mid-circumnavigation.
You can move your account — with friction. "Localising" your subscription to the country you're actually in restarts everything, but it's a full account shutdown and re-signup with antenna verification, and there are waiting periods between changes. We cover this properly, with the Pacific-specific maths, in our companion post on Starlink workarounds for Pacific cruisers.
Why Starlink did it
No sympathy required, but the logic is straightforward: Starlink now sells capacity by geography, prices each country to its market, and doesn't love accounts registered in cheap countries consuming capacity in expensive ones — or land-priced plans being used at sea, where maritime customers (shipping, superyachts, offshore energy) pay premium rates. Cruisers were a rounding error who happened to benefit from loose rules. The rules are no longer loose. Riley Whitelum of Sailing La Vagabonde publicly called on Starlink in mid-August to work with the cruising community on a fair solution, and he's not alone — but as of today there's no cruiser-shaped plan on the menu.
What it means if you're cruising the Pacific
For the NZ–Fiji–Tonga–Vanuatu circuit that we sail, the honest summary is: Starlink still works everywhere it did last month — what changed is the admin and the price of staying connected for more than 30 days per country. A typical Pacific season now needs a plan: register the account somewhere sensible, sequence the season around the 30-day windows, budget for a Priority month where needed, or accept a mid-season localisation. None of it is a dealbreaker; all of it is homework that didn't exist before. Passage-making itself is largely unchanged for short hops, but multi-day ocean passages sit in a grey zone that Priority data covers cleanly and Roam may not — another line item for the passage budget.
What it means if you're buying a boat to go cruising
If you're shopping for a catamaran with the South Pacific in mind — which, given what we sell and write about here, you may be — don't let this headline put you off. Connectivity aboard is still radically better than it was even three years ago, when a Fiji season meant patchy island SIM cards and an Iridium subscription for weather. The realistic budget line has moved from "about $100 a month" to "$100–$300 a month depending on how you play it", and the setup now rewards a bit of planning. That's the full extent of the bad news. Weather models, family video calls and remote work from a Fijian anchorage all still work — we're proof, this article included.
The short version
Global Roam is dead, Roam Unlimited stops 30 days after you leave your registered country, and unlimited-style ocean data now costs Priority money. Europe and North America got regional groupings that spare most of their cruisers; the Pacific didn't. The workarounds — account localisation, plan-juggling, season sequencing — are real and workable, and we've written them up in detail in the next post. The era of set-and-forget cheap global boat internet is over; the era of managed, still-pretty-good boat internet has begun.
Keep reading: the practical follow-up is Starlink workarounds for Pacific cruisers — localisation, plan strategy and season maths. Planning the bigger picture? Start with buying a catamaran in New Zealand, or see what a connected liveaboard looks like in our Fusion 40 review. And if you’re shopping for the boat to go with the bandwidth, Mā Tori, our Fusion 40 catamaran for sale, is lying in Fiji.