Over the past year, Maersk has been quietly executing one of the more ambitious private cellular deployments in the maritime sector, upgrading IoT connectivity across roughly 450 vessels using private LTE. While the original announcements date back to mid-2025, the programme is now approaching completion, with fleet-wide impact becoming clearer as the technology beds in. From a private networks perspective, this is less about incremental connectivity upgrades and more about re-architecting how data is generated, processed, and moved across a highly mobile and globally distributed environment.
At the heart of the initiative is the replacement of legacy 2G-based onboard connectivity with a unified 4G platform designed specifically for large-scale IoT. The limitations of 2G were well understood, particularly for use cases such as refrigerated container monitoring where infrequent updates restricted visibility and responsiveness. By moving to LTE and low power wide area technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-M, Maersk has significantly increased data granularity while retaining the power efficiency required for thousands of sensors operating continuously at sea.
What makes this deployment particularly interesting is that it is not simply an access network upgrade. Each vessel effectively hosts its own private LTE network, complete with a locally deployed software-defined core provided by Onomondo. This onboard Evolved Packet Core allows IoT services to continue functioning even when satellite backhaul is unavailable, addressing one of the long-standing blind spots in maritime connectivity. From an architectural standpoint, this pushes intelligence closer to the edge, enabling resilience and deterministic behaviour that would be difficult to achieve with a purely centralised model.
Nokia’s role sits primarily in the radio and network management layers. The private wireless solution supplied to Maersk includes small cell radio equipment tailored for the vessel environment, compact baseband units, and custom antennas designed to operate reliably across different ship classes. These radios form the access layer for onboard devices, while Nokia’s MantaRay network management system provides centralised visibility and control from Maersk’s operations centres. This combination allows the fleet to be managed as a single logical network despite being physically dispersed across oceans and ports worldwide.
A key design principle of the platform is interoperability between private and public networks. Devices are able to move seamlessly between a vessel’s private LTE network and terrestrial public LTE networks when containers transition from sea to port to inland transport. This is enabled through SIM-based roaming mechanisms rather than bespoke integrations, which simplifies operations at scale. Onomondo’s ability to act as a maritime mobile network operator, including support for inbound roaming and bring your own IoT device models, extends this flexibility further and reduces lock-in for both Maersk and its customers.
Beyond the headline technologies, several other partners play enabling roles in the overall system. Satellite connectivity remains essential for backhaul, with 42com Sat contributing to the communications layer that links vessels to shore. Complea supports the industrial IoT aspects of the solution, particularly around device integration and lifecycle management, while ZEDEDA provides edge orchestration capabilities that help manage onboard compute and networking resources. Together, these components form a layered architecture that blends private cellular, satellite, edge computing, and cloud-based management.
From a private networks technology viewpoint, the Maersk deployment demonstrates how LTE can be adapted to environments that sit far outside traditional enterprise campuses or factories. The combination of onboard private LTE, local core functions, and seamless roaming blurs the line between fixed and mobile private networks. It also provides a practical example of how standards-based cellular technologies can scale to tens of thousands of moving assets without excessive operational complexity.
As the rollout moves into its final stages in early 2026, the focus is shifting from installation to optimisation and service evolution. With the foundational connectivity in place, Maersk is now positioned to support more advanced analytics, tighter supply chain integration, and future migration paths towards 5G-based IoT when the use cases justify it. For the private networks community, this project stands out not because it uses new technologies, but because it applies them coherently, at scale, and in one of the most challenging operational environments imaginable.
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