I have yet to see a report of a Starlink dish not working in waves. The phased array
antenna can adjust the beam far faster than any wave can move your
boat. Nor have I heard of one damaged by
salt spray. Starlink put a lot of though into
water protection. The cable connections are a thing of beauty with double gaskets. Heavy clouds and rain seems to have less effect on Starlink connectivity than Iridium Go.
Starlink has committed to global mid ocean service for the Maritime service for non-polar regions by end of Q1 2023. This is because they have launched enough laser equiped satelites that ground station proximity is no longer a factor.
I do think it's likely that RV will be geofenced soon to within 10 miles or so of shore - but the most recent terms of service describe an add on feature called "ocean data" that will be
sold by the GB. No pricing for this but this may provide good mid-ocean service for RV who want 10GB of data not 1 terabyte as offered on Maritime. It's just conjecture but perhaps $30 for 10GB like a
cell phone. Not for streaming movies but
email,
weather, messaging, voice, and web browsing will be much better than Iridium GO. It will be interesting to see what is announced.
Starlink is such an incredible speed improvement over Iridium GO that I can't imagine not having one aboard in a crossing. And it's cheaper.
Starlink is just as good if not better than Iridium GO as a
distress communications system up to the point where you might be abandoning ship. It can be set up to run off 12V instead of through an
inverter. When abandoning ship Iridium Go is not really a good solution either as it's not really meant to go swimming. I carry an InReach as my backup
distress communications system and an
EPIRB plus PLB's and
AIS MOB's for each crew as the backup to the backup.
This will all change again in a few years as Apple and Tmobile roll out their
cell phone satelite services. Tmobile will use the next generation of Starlink satelite that starts launching this month. Apple is already dispatching SAR helicopters to
Iphone distress communications from cars and Tmobile is promising better than 3Mbps. These will kill both InReach and Iridium GO just like Starlink is killing ViaSat on megayachts.