Atlantic ocean with Roon ARC

We are aboard the Nieuw Statendam, a Holland America Line Pinnacle Class ship, traveling from Florida to Rotterdam. This ship has Starlink and we have the entry level wifi package that allows email en web browsing. So that’s great to try everything we set up on our MacMini back in Florida, right? 😉

The last couple blog posts were already done from the ocean, this works perfectly, as do all web browser based applications. Our Wireguard VPN is another matter: it does establish a tunnel but is unworkably slow. A commercial service like SurfShark doesn’t establish a tunnel at all. Amazingly, our Roon server works perfectly and with the Roon ARC app I can browse our library and play songs just like anywhere.

This is great, but why does ARC work and Wireguard not? I think the answer is simple: the supported services mentioned in our wifi package are all TCP based. Roon ARC is TCP but Wireguard is UDP.

I believe they block IP ranges and ports associated with known services that are not in the wifi package. For example, YouTube isn’t in our package, it is TCP but doesn’t work at all. You can upgrade to a more expensive wifi package that does support YouTube.

So one thing that I may consider is to setup one alternative VPN configuration and that is an OpenVPN tunnel using TCP instead of UDP. This might just be able to go by undetected like Roon ARC for this situation.

Another interesting fact: we’re now at Bermuda and my IP is still based in the USA, which means the Starlink surface station used is in the USA (I guess they don’t have a station in Bermuda yet or don’t even plan one there). I can still freely access all news sources. Our next landfall will be in the UK and I wonder what our IP will be and if we get any filtering. After that we go to France which should fall under the EU filtering so we can check all that as we go.