In short: Port Wi-Fi usually covers the gatehouse, the offices and the seafarers' centre, and stops well short of the berth, which is where visiting crews and quay staff spend their time. We think the most practical fix is a private 5G network carrying traffic along the quay, with Wi-Fi only at the gangway and in welfare buildings, because that pairs a network that survives the container stacks with access every crew phone already understands.
Key Takeaways
- The berth is the blind spot — Most port Wi-Fi was designed for buildings, so coverage fades out across hundreds of metres of open quay before it reaches the ship.
- Crews need it on a short clock — A container ship can turn round in under 24 hours, so seafarers who cannot get ashore depend on whatever signal reaches the gangway.
- 5G along the quay, Wi-Fi at the point of use — A private 5G backbone feeds small Wi-Fi hotspots at each berth and welfare cabin, so one network serves port operations and crew welfare.
In a nutshell
Why is port Wi-Fi so poor at the berth?
Port Wi-Fi is poor at the berth because it was almost always designed outwards from buildings, and a berth is a long way from a building. The typical UK port network started life covering the administration block, the gatehouse and perhaps a canteen, and was then stretched outwards with access points bolted to lighting columns and warehouse walls. By the time it reaches a quay wall 400 metres from the nearest office, the signal has crossed open tarmac, container stacks and moving plant, and very little of it is left.
Three physical problems compound one another. Firstly, distance. Wi-Fi access points are low-power devices, limited under Ofcom's licence-exemption rules to 100 milliwatts at 2.4 GHz and at most 1 watt in the upper 5 GHz band, and a phone inside a ship's accommodation block has a weaker transmitter still. The link fails in the uplink first, because the phone can hear the network long after the network has stopped hearing the phone, which is why crews report "full bars, nothing loads". Secondly, steel. A ship's hull and superstructure attenuate radio heavily, and a stack of containers four or five high between the access point and the vessel blocks the 5 GHz band almost entirely. Thirdly, change. The stacks move every shift, so a coverage survey done on a quiet Tuesday tells you little about a busy Friday with two vessels alongside.
Ports could, in principle, add more access points. In practice every new access point on an open quay needs power, a data cable or a mesh link, a mounting point clear of plant and a maintenance plan, and the quay is the most hostile place on the estate to install any of them.
Who actually needs connectivity at the quay?
Two groups need it, and they are often treated as separate projects.
The first is visiting crew. A container ship or bulk carrier typically carries a crew of 18 to 25, many of whom have spent weeks at sea on a rationed satellite allowance. Port arrival is when they phone home, bank, renew documents and download the messages that have queued up. The Maritime Labour Convention 2006, which the UK ratified in 2013, requires flag and port states under Regulation 4.4 to promote shore-based welfare facilities for seafarers, and in the UK the Merchant Navy Welfare Board coordinates the port welfare committees that do much of this work. Charities such as the Mission to Seafarers, Stella Maris and the Sailors' Society run seafarers' centres and ship-visiting teams at ports across the country, and their ship visitors have for years carried portable Wi-Fi hotspots and local SIM cards up the gangway because the port network does not reach the ship.
The second group is the port's own workforce at the berth: lashers, checkers, tally clerks, pilots and agents boarding and leaving, plus contractors carrying out hull surveys or bunkering. They use handheld terminals, tablets for vessel planning and inspection apps, and they lose them in exactly the same places the crew do.
Treating these as one design problem matters because the expensive part, getting a reliable signal along a kilometre of quay, is shared. The access each group needs at the far end is different, and that difference should shape the design.
Why can't crews just use the ship's satellite or a mobile network?
Many ships now carry better satellite links than they did five years ago. Low-earth-orbit services such as Starlink Maritime and OneWeb have pushed crew bandwidth up sharply on vessels where the owner has paid for them. However, crew allowances are still often capped per person per month, plenty of older tonnage and smaller operators remain on legacy VSAT, and the satellite terminal is a shared resource with the ship's operational traffic. Arrival in port is also when the ship's own systems are busiest, with port state paperwork, cargo plans and agency traffic competing for the same link.
Public mobile networks are the other option, and they work better than port Wi-Fi in some places and worse in others. UK operators plan their macro sites to cover towns, roads and homes, and a deep-water berth on the seaward edge of an estuary is frequently at the margin of a cell aimed at the town behind it. Visiting crew phones also roam on foreign SIMs, so data is either expensive or blocked by the home operator, and buying a UK SIM means getting ashore to a shop. At a container terminal that is not straightforward: crews generally cannot walk through an operational terminal, rely on a shuttle or a welfare minibus to reach the gate, and may have only a few hours between finishing a watch and sailing.
This is why the port's own network carries so much weight for welfare. It is the only connection a seafarer can join for free, in English, from the deck of the ship, without leaving the terminal.
How does private 5G change the design of port Wi-Fi?
Private 5G changes the design by doing the hard part, covering the quay, with a technology built for wide outdoor areas, and leaving Wi-Fi to do the easy part, connecting phones at close range.
In the pattern we recommend, a small number of 5G radios on lighting towers or crane rails cover the quay, the stacking area and the approach to each berth, using spectrum from Ofcom's shared access licence in the n77 band (3.8 to 4.2 GHz). Each radio covers hundreds of metres, transmits at higher power than a Wi-Fi access point, and handles the movement of vehicles and people between cells without dropping sessions. At each berth and at welfare points, a ruggedised 5G router with a Wi-Fi radio built in creates a local hotspot: on the quay wall at the gangway, in a crew welfare cabin, in the seafarers' centre, in the pilot's hut. Crews connect to Wi-Fi as they would anywhere else; the traffic rides home over the private 5G network.
We run a similar arrangement ourselves for traders at the Bath Christmas Market, where 5G routers on our private network feed Wi-Fi to individual stalls along streets that no cabled network was ever going to reach in time. A quayside is a harder radio environment than a city street, but the logic carries over, with the wide-area network where cabling is impractical and Wi-Fi where people stand.
The approach has three practical advantages: (i) hotspots can move, because a 5G router needs only power, so a port can position one at whichever berth has a vessel alongside or fit one to a welfare minibus; (ii) the port's operational devices, such as handheld terminals, cameras and vehicle terminals, can join the 5G network directly with a SIM or eSIM, separated from crew traffic at the network level, without sharing a Wi-Fi channel with 20 people making video calls home; and (iii) the port controls priority, so crew traffic can be capped and placed lowest, and an operational call or a crane camera never queues behind it.
What are the trade-offs?
We would not claim this is free or universally right. A private 5G network has a higher upfront cost than adding a handful of access points, and for a small harbour with a single berth 100 metres from the office, a well-placed outdoor Wi-Fi bridge may be all that is needed. The case for 5G grows with the length of quay, the number of berths and the amount of moving steel between them.
There are also questions a port should settle before it buys anything:
- Who pays for crew access. Welfare connectivity is a cost to the port with no direct revenue, though some ports recover it through port dues or a welfare levy, and some welfare charities contribute towards it.
- What crew may use it for. A clear acceptable-use policy, content filtering and per-device data caps protect the network and the port's reputation.
- How access is granted. A simple splash page or a voucher printed on the ship's arrival pack is more practical than an account system that assumes a UK email address and a UK mobile number.
- Where the security boundary sits. Crew traffic must break out to the internet on a path entirely separate from port operational systems and anything covered by the port facility security plan under the ISPS Code.
The welfare case and the operational case also help each other. A port welfare committee can put a direct, human case to a harbour board, and the same coverage then carries lashing tablets, berth cameras and vessel inspection apps that would otherwise have needed their own project.
What should a port measure before choosing a design?
A port should measure where people actually stand, not where the network is easiest to reach. A useful survey records signal strength and uplink throughput from a phone held at deck height on the berth side, at the gangway foot, inside a welfare cabin and at the pilot boarding point, with a vessel alongside and the stack at a normal working height. It should repeat the readings for each public operator as well as the existing Wi-Fi, because the gap between "visible" and "usable" is where most port networks fail.
The second measurement is demand. A crew of 22 each downloading a week's worth of messages and making a video call can use several gigabytes within an hour of arrival, and a port with three berths occupied at once multiplies that. Sizing the backbone on peak arrival demand rather than average office use is the difference between a network that works on day one and one that receives complaints by the end of the first month.
From there, the design follows from three numbers: the length of quay to be covered, the number of berths that can be occupied at once, and the number of fixed welfare points. We will happily run that survey and model coverage for a specific port before any equipment is ordered, so the harbour board sees a coverage map and a cost against each berth, rather than a generic proposal.