A guest who has just paid a very large sum for the week holds up a phone with one spinning icon and says, "I get better internet in a field." She is not entirely wrong, and no amount of apologising will change the physics. What changes the conversation is understanding what is actually happening between her phone and the rest of the world.
The connectivity stack
Most yachts run several links and blend or switch between them:
| Link | Character | What guests notice |
|---|---|---|
| VSAT (geostationary satellite) | Wide coverage, high latency, expensive, contended bandwidth | Video calls lag; heavy streaming struggles |
| LEO service (Starlink-type low-orbit) | Much faster and lower latency, but coverage and service can vary by region and can be blocked or degraded | Great one day, patchy the next |
| 4G/5G | Excellent near a coast, useless offshore | Brilliant in the marina, gone an hour out |
| Marina wifi | Free, and usually saturated and insecure | Slow at peak times |
Bandwidth is shared by everyone on board. One guest with an auto-syncing cloud backup or a 4K stream can quietly starve the whole boat. That is not something the interior fixes - but it is something the interior should recognise and report.
Three networks, deliberately kept apart
- Vessel/operational network - navigation, alarms, ship systems. Absolutely never for guest devices.
- Crew network - crew devices and admin.
- Guest network - the only one a guest device ever joins.
They are separated on purpose, so that a guest's compromised laptop cannot reach ship systems and so that guest traffic cannot swamp operational traffic. Never move a device between networks, hand out a crew or vessel password, or plug a guest's kit into a wall port to "make it faster". If a guest cannot get something to work on the guest network, that is an ETO question, not a workaround.
The ETO is the owner of all of this
The ETO (or AV-ETO on larger yachts) commissions, maintains and repairs the AV and IT systems. On smaller yachts the role may sit with an engineer or an external contractor. Your job is to know the system well enough to operate it, fix the trivial, and escalate everything else with a clear, useful report. Their instructions and the yacht's own documentation override anything written here.
Onboard Notes
- Learn, in one honest sentence, how to describe your yacht's internet to a guest - without blaming, over-promising or bluffing.
- Know whether your yacht has a data cap or a per-guest limit, and who is allowed to lift it.
- Guest wifi password: hand it over on the yacht's terms, and know when it is rotated.
- If someone asks you for the crew or vessel network, the answer is always no - politely, and then tell the ETO.