Being aboard Aruna full time means having excellent internet for work and play. I've fine tuned my system to something that works extremely well for remote work use no matter where I am.
Super interesting… and I don’t even live aboard! I’m now diving deep into Unifi - would that work on a boat?
Keep up the journaling, really enjoyable
Fair seas…
UniFi equipment is fantastic. I actually manage some moderate-to-large deployments of UniFi equipment for marinas, and would not use anything else for those harsh environments. As fast as this tech updates, it’s not worth investing in the bigger vendors since replacing it every 2-3 years is possible with the cheaper UniFi equipment.
UniFi aboard is very popular. I actually use their access points on Aruna as well when the Peplink ones start misbehaving. Their management software and compatibility of their access points is very, very good. Everything connects fine and works very well.
The challenge is at the router side. Their products are built for normal land-based internet connections so they lack a lot of the features around cellular connections and optimizing things at that level. They could definitely handle multiple Starlink connections, but bonding and VPNs would be dealt with differently and likely not as gracefully.
You could use their access points, like I do, and Peplink for the router part. Or you could use UniFi’s router/dream machine/etc. “behind” the Peplink so you get all of the features of their router, and let the Peplink do the internet connections. Would use more power of course.
I too am having issues with Peplink BR2 and AP One AX. Any suggestions?
Not without more information. I’m not having any issues with my BR2, just the AP One AX in terms of device compatibility and performance.
After all the issues I used to have with an older AP One, I switched for ~14 months to one of the simple Unifi POE WAPs, but I was having really bad issues requiring me to reboot it every couple weeks, and then later on every few days and it culminated into having to reboot it every few hours to keep connectivity up, at which point I upgraded to an AP One AX.
I’ve had some issues with 2.4G devices randomly dropping out with the AP One AX, especially the Vesper Cortex. I’ve set my BR2 Pro and AP One AX up to reboot every week at 4am Sunday morning. That’s virtually eliminated problems with my AP One AX. What kind of compatibility issues are you seeing?
The Vesper Cortex is one of my problems and quite irritating. In addition, I’ve seen other devices such as Sonos, Blusound, various IoT devices and the like have issues with 2.4Ghz.
I have also seen significant performance issues that require constant reboots, and in “noisy” WiFi environments, get positively unusable no matter how many reboots you perform.
Testing side-by-side, with differing and similar channels, using UniFi and several other APs, I see none of those issues.
Nevertheless, I still use the AP One AX a lot because of its simple management platform and low power use…
FWIW, I first tried only rebooting the AP One AX regularly, and still had problems. However, when I rebooted both it and the AP Controller (BR2) at the same time, that significantly mitigated the problems. YMMV, of course, and correlation is not causation…
Separately, it’s funny how much we’ve converged on a similar setup in many ways – BR2 Pro, and I used 3 starlinks (2 gen 2s and one highpo flat) for a while before downgrading to just 2 (highpo and one gen2) this past season because I wasn’t getting much benefit out of the 3rd, but I keep it hooked up and ready to turn on as a hot spare.
I’m still using 3x cellular connections via 3 Peplink Mobility 40G Marine antennas, and I’m intrigued that you have dropped down to the tiny local antennas. Has coverage in the islands gotten good enough that you don’t need crazy boosters anymore, or is it really just a reflection how much you happily rely on starlink as your main internet now?
I can’t remember the last time I used wifi as wan with better results than the rest of my setup, so doing it over again I definitely wouldn’t bother with the giant wifi antennas, but this basic setup was all built up in 2021 before starlink, and I hadn’t thought about what it would look like to do it all over from scratch, so you have me thinking now…
I think the issues I’m seeing both with my AP One AX’s and other customers are specific to the AP itself, not necessarily the connection to the router or anything the controller software is doing. I just think they’re not as robust or supported APs as UniFi or other solutions.
I spend about 50% of my time in Canada and use Starlink + Google Fi depending on where I am. The rest of the time in the US I’m anywhere between Olympia and the San Juan Islands, and cellular has become extremely reliable. Having the bigger marine antennas would help, but as I mentioned in the story, it’s just not worth the extra cost/space of cabling and antennas.
I would say 80% of the time I use Starlink on average. In the remote locations in Canada that I spend a lot of time in, that would go up to 100%. So yes, partly this is because of what Starlink has brought. But cellular has still gotten better, and given that my router is upstairs, with little in its way, the factory antennas work pretty well.
I will likely throw one of the bigger antennas up for testing, but I don’t expect huge gains across the board.
Yeah but it’s interesting how necessity (hassle) has led you to the simpler solution that’s working great for you. I’m very interested to see how your results fare if you play with the big antennas. Especially in rural new england (like out in Maine east of Portland), we’ve definitely needed the extenders, but cellular coverage has expanded so much that it wouldn’t be super surprising to me if it’s good enough in 95% of places that you can just rely on starlink the rest of the time and be fine… I already have these giant antennas on top that I’ll keep using for now, but if we ever get around to boat swapping, I’ll have to strongly consider simplifying my setup like you have…
Hi Steve - Happy to see Aruna is working out for you! I feel like such a caveman with my collection of antiques 
Currently running the BR1 mini LTEA with an older AP1-RUG (the olde one with three antennas) and a Mobility 22. This setup worked a charm last year from the Bahamas through Penobscot Bay with only a few gaps up in Maine. Speeds were more than adequate for us - but we’re not working on board!
I’m building an upgrade this winter whilst hanging around in FL getting two new knees (never get old - it isn’t any fun) with a BR1 Pro Cat20 (paid thru 6/27!) and a Mobility 42, as it has the requisite 4X4 cell antennas and also better performance on Band 71, which would have helped Down East. I’m also changing the installation to cut out about 10 feet of coax - the extra coax & connectors can’t be helping much.
On the olde AP1 RUG, I’ve tried to spread the coverage around the boat by running the antennas out - the AP is at the Nav station in the salon, I wired one back aft in the stateroom (nameless Chinese puck) and one up top on the coachroof (MobileMark) at the front of the cockpit. Seems to work, but I haven’t really explored to see how far off the boat it gets. One question I could never get answered was whether all three antennas are dual-band, or if Peplink split them up.
yeah, i can see that… the router part. elliott bay us putting in fiber and using unifi!
i guess PoE too much of a draw on the boat?
I believe that at least one of them is single band, but I was never able to confirm this either.
I have both the older version and newer version of the Rugged AP, and prefer them because of their reliability and power, especially at 2.4Ghz, but they lag behind in terms of the newest WiFi standards. That ends up causing performance issues for some of the more modern devices I have.
It would really depend on your boat, battery bank, and general power usage trends. You can run UniFi AP’s from a PoE switch, or use injectors as I’ve discussed before in older articles. A PoE switch would either require AC power, or use DC voltage to convert things to PoE, similar to the injector. All of them would have some loss since you’d be likely converting from 12/24v to 48-56v for PoE.
The additional challenge is running UniFi’s management software, which would be required in most cases with any access point. UniFi requires that software at least to set things up, but you really would want to run it continuously for updates, changes, etc. That software can be run on a linux machine, although it is not the primary supported method. They prefer you use their various platforms to run it which could include a router or a dedicated device (CloudKey, etc.) to do so. Both would require more power (CloudKey’s use PoE) which adds to the overall power budget.
got it, thanks for all the replies
Very nice to have you back! We all appreciate your thorough approach to content.
I too have been having a lot of issues with my AP One Ax. After documenting my tests with and without the AP on Clever Mariner (and feeling very smug about my setup), I have had to do more tinkering with the AP than anything else in my setup.
The worst has been the AP inexplicably dropping off the mesh in a wireless mesh setup. This seems to happen if the AP loses power for some reason. The only way to solve it has been to be to reconnect the AP to wired LAN and make my br1 pro 5g re-sync the AP config.
I realize running a wireless mesh setup is far from ideal, but it’s advertised to work, and I’m pretty disappointed.
Some nights when I’m ready to throw the AP overboard, I am reminded that I have absolutely no issues running a wireless mesh with a non-fancy, non-enterprise tp-link deco system at our land home. Land home is set up for AirBNB, the house is historic from 1780, and running cables is…challenging.
This is my second big hiccup in working with Peplink products. My initial setup was built around the Max Transit Cat 18. And I ran into endless issues with the processor being severely underpowered to handle their advertised features. If we had a few folks on the boat trying to use Speedfusion, the processor was always pegged at 100%, and performance of all devices suffered mightily.
I’m 85% convinced that I should stop relying on the BR1 Pro 5G to handle my cellular modem, router, and bonding/smooting all in one. There’s a few other bonding solutions that seem interesting now, and we seem to have to upgrade cellular modem tech every few years anyway.
Maybe the solution is going SaaS for bonding/smoothing, married to an openwrt router, and a separate cellular modem (that can be more cost effectively be upgraded)?
Hey, no mention of the upcoming, rumored, Kuiper satellite internet roll out ! Worthy competitor or also-ran?
Mesh is hard to get right, surprisingly. A lot of companies have struggled with it, and in the last few years, most have finally gotten it right. I would not expect Peplink’s version to be that robust. I’ve tested it a few times, and compared to UniFi, Netgear, and others, it has its challenges.
This was a problem in all the later versions of the Transit line. It caused performance issues all across the board including what you saw. I had many, many customers with ongoing issues, and I had my own challenges as well. The newer BR series is a much faster processor and I don’t see any of the same issues, but the damage was done with Peplink leaving that older processor in their Transit line for too long.
I have been testing some software bonding solutions that are promising, but many of them still require multiple UIs or pieces put together to make them work right. I’m hoping to find a combo that might work well.
It’s great to see you posting again. I always appreciate your articles.
-Mic
Hi Steve, great post. I always learn a lot from your explorations! You might want to tag this post as “Article Discussions” too so it shows up in that category when folks get to seabits via the link from your email with the article. Took me a bit of effort to find this discussion thread.