Offshore eSIM data — rigs, wind farms and support vessels

The rest of this site is about holidays. This page is not. Offshore data is a working product for people whose job puts them a long way from a mast, and it runs on completely different infrastructure from the cruise plans we cover everywhere else.

Who this is for

Offshore data solves a narrow problem for a specific group of people, and if you are not in it, the honest advice is to stop reading and buy nothing:

• Oil and gas crews working platforms, drilling units and floating production vessels, who are on a rotation rather than a trip and want their own connection rather than a shared installation network.
• Offshore wind technicians — a fast-growing group in the North Sea in particular, working turbine arrays and substations that are far enough out that shore coverage is unreliable but well inside Tampnet build-out.
• Support and supply vessel crews, who move between installations rather than sitting on one, and for whom coverage along the routes matters as much as coverage at the destinations.
• Maritime operators and surveyors running equipment that reports back to shore, where latency and a normal IP path matter more than raw throughput.

The common thread is that all four are working, not holidaying, and are usually paying through an employer or expensing it. That is why the pricing section below is written the way it is.

The Tampnet network

GigSky describes Tampnet as the number one offshore network provider, and the partnership is the whole reason the offshore product exists as something distinct from the cruise one. Tampnet operates offshore mobile infrastructure — base stations mounted on platforms and along the coast, linked back to shore — rather than reselling satellite capacity.

That architectural difference is worth understanding because it decides what the product feels like to use. A satellite-backed maritime connection adds meaningful latency: fine for messaging and email, awkward for a video call, painful for anything interactive. A terrestrial offshore network behaves like ordinary mobile data, because that is what it is — the signal is simply reaching you from a mast standing in the sea rather than one standing in a field.

The trade is coverage. Satellite reaches almost anywhere and is therefore what cruise ships use. Platform-mounted infrastructure reaches only where the platforms are, which is why this product covers two basins rather than the world.

Where it reaches — and where it does not

Two regions: the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Those are the basins with the density of offshore installations that makes this kind of network economic to build, and they are also two of the busiest working-offshore regions in the world.

GigSky attaches a caution to its own offshore page, and we are going to repeat it rather than soften it: always check the coverage map before purchasing. That is not boilerplate. Coverage inside a basin follows installations and the corridors between them — it is not a uniform blanket over the whole North Sea, and a field on the edge of the build-out may have thinner service than one in the middle of it. The map is the only authority on whether your specific location is covered, and it is worth checking against the actual coordinates you will be working at rather than the region name.

Outside those two basins there is no offshore service to buy from this provider at all. Not thin coverage — none.

How it differs from a cruise eSIM

These two products share a brand and almost nothing else, and buying the wrong one is an easy mistake to make because both are sold as "maritime data".

The practical consequence: a cruise plan bought for a rig will not connect, and an offshore plan bought for a Caribbean sailing will not connect either. If you are on a passenger ship of any kind — including a ferry — you want the cruise and ferry side of the site instead.

Yachts and sailing: read this before buying

A lot of people arrive at offshore data pages hoping it is the answer to staying connected on a private boat. Usually it is not, and this is the section we would want to read first.

An offshore plan is not an open-ocean plan. The coverage is two working basins. If your sailing is Mediterranean cruising, an Atlantic crossing, Caribbean island-hopping or anywhere in the Pacific, this product does nothing for you at any price. The marketing language around "offshore" invites the assumption that it means "at sea generally", and it does not.

The genuine exception is the North Sea. If you sail the Norwegian coast, the UK sector, or between the two, you are inside real coverage and the terrestrial latency is a material advantage over any satellite option in that price range. Check your intended route against the coverage map before assuming it — the same caution as above applies more, not less, to a boat that is choosing its own track rather than following a fixed field.

For everything else, a genuine at-sea maritime eSIM is the honest alternative. GigSky, Saily, Maya.net, OneRoam, eSIM.dog, Voye Global and Red Bull MOBILE eSIM are the providers that actually connect in open water, and our coverage explainer sets out what each of them can and cannot do beyond the twelve-mile line.

Plans and pricing

We are not showing prices here, because GigSky does not publish them. Offshore plans are quoted at checkout rather than listed, and there are no offshore rows in our catalogue to display. Everywhere else on this site the numbers come from our own sync and carry the date they were checked; here we have nothing to sync.

We could have written "from $X" and hedged it. We would rather tell you that people buying this are usually putting it through an employer, and a figure we cannot stand behind ending up in someone's budget request is a worse outcome than an empty table.

What we can tell you about the commercial shape, from GigSky's own terms:

• Commitment-free. No contract to sign and nothing to cancel.
• Short- or longer-term. Sized to a rotation rather than to a billing month, which is the right shape for hitch-based work.
• No hidden fees beyond the quoted plan.

Check live offshore pricing at GigSky

The ESIMDUDE code is applied through our link. We have verified it against cruise and ferry checkouts; whether it applies to offshore plans is not something we have been able to confirm, so treat it as worth trying rather than as a promise.

Why there are no region pages here

You would expect a North Sea page and a Gulf of Mexico page, and eventually there will be. There are not today because we do not yet hold enough region-specific fact — field names, operator practice, verified coverage detail — to write two pages that differ by more than the basin name. Publishing those would waste your time and dilute this one. When the detail exists, they get built.