Paradisean Networking Plan

The dream of sailing off into the sunset and being totally disconnected from the world is our goal, but realistically, we still need to maintain a connection for navigation, weather, family, and our girls' education. As with other parts of our boat, we wanted redundancy as well as robustness for our network setup.

The heart of the boat is the Cloud Gateway Industrial from Ubiquiti. It came out in early 2026 and was perfect for our needs based on its rugged aluminum body design, high temperature rating, built-in 3 PoE++ ports with up to 270W budget, and support for up to 5 WAN sources. It also has NVR support for any UniFi camera that we will install in the future. We also wanted a managed switch so we can set up multiple VLANs as well as meter and throttle our internet use.

The gateway will power a mast-mounted omnidirectional Wi-Fi client bridge to help seek out land-based Wi-Fi. If land-based Wi-Fi isn't available, we will get data using a mast-mounted 5G modem that supports remote SIM as well as eSIM. In the event that cell data is also unavailable, the final backup will be the Starlink Mini, which will hopefully give us connectivity even in the most remote places. All three WAN sources are PoE+ or PoE++ powered and can be managed from the gateway.

The rest of the network will connect through the Flex 2.5G PoE switch that can support up to 90W of power among its 8 ports. We plan to connect all the IP cameras to that switch, and set up the UniFi Superlink Gateway for boat monitoring and alarms, which I hope to cover in a separate post.

The boat comes with the NEP-2, and we plan to connect all the navigation instruments, including our thermal camera, to that network, isolating it on a separate VLAN.