ballroom-cruisers

Having just returned from QM2, the internet via the ship's wifi on the voyage was not too bad at the start of the voyage, but got progressively worse as time passed. If you connected and were continuing to use it generally it was OK, if pretty slow. But if you left your phone doing nothing for around 20 minutes it generally disconnected and you had to log in again. Periodically, at times when a lot of people were using it, you could even be be disconnected in the middle of composing an email for example. So yes, it was not ideal, and having a mobile phone connection with 4G at ports, independent of Cunard, saved the day, and certainly on sea days it was frustrating trying to get messaging done especially if uploading a single pictured to send to friends or relatives - when it was usually tortuously slow.

Possibly but I don't know and didn't recognise the person.

I think the captain's departure announcement said that all passengers were back on board as we were about to slip the lines and thrust off the berth. So I think not.

A few additional comments as we get to the end of this voyage. The jazz trio in the Chart Room have played beautifully each evening, including some music that could very easily be danced to if they were playing in the ballroom! The food, particularly on Gala nights, has been excellent. All of the crew who have served us on the dining room, bars and room steward have been superb. The only time masks have been required was for disembarking and embarking at ports, and in the tenders and shuttle buses. Although most people complied properly, a few brazenly ignored that requirement, including some rude and inconsiderate people who, not only were not wearing masks, but also coughing every minute, and should have been going to the medical centre to check their status. Equally one day on deck a man about 10 feet away was coughing his guts out so we moved well away. Again that was utterly inconsiderate. Although we are gradually moving to increasingly less Covid protocols, clearly anyone who had obvious symptoms should not put others at risk deliberately and people need to act responsibly even though the majority will not need masks most of the time. On the whole it has beena lovely voyage and almost uniquely the sea state has never been more than 'slight' the entire time. I'm sure others will post more observations and comments about this cruise. But overall a great success.

Sorry to hear that Exlondoner has Covid and hope it is mild with a quick recovery. It's not fun being unwell and also not fun missing normal on board life while you recover. But if you have any other cruises booked in the next few months at least you'll be very much less likely to catch it again next time you are enjoying a voyage.

Agree entirely... It was the same on this voyage... Exile played in the Queens Room last night and are way better than the Queens Room orchestra currently, and indeed did play some ballroom and Latin phrased pieces of music, despite being nominally a party night.

We have not heard anything at all about why it was cancelled. Just heard people talking about having had to organise different shore trips and being sad at missing the trips they had previously booked on the original schedule. We weren't personally affected as we'd been to Florence many times in the past. Others were happy that they could do longer outings since the ship stayed overnight, and evening restaurant outings in Rome were possible.

It's been variable... The pianist, Campbell Simpson, was replaced by the Queens Room orchestra pianist on two evenings and he played till around 11.30pm on two evenings. Campbell is back the past few evenings and he did play till 11.45pm a couple of nights ago but it's variable and be seems not that interested in playing, and plays small bits of the same pieces each evening. The Queens Room orchestra is a bit of a shambles and don't understand how music relates to dancing, and play tempos that are wrong for the dances and often change during a dance. Quicksteps that are too slow or fast, foxtrots and rumbas that have weird phrasing and can change speed as you dance and the sax often squeaks at the end of a note. They are pretty inexperienced. The jazz group in the Chart Room late evening play nicely and it's a nice atmosphere there to wind down at the end of the evening, though cocktails aren't at the same quality as in the Commodore Club. Overall a lovely cruise though. Yes it was very hot in Italy but a little less hot in Lisbon today. In general passengers look happy and relaxed, and the crew are doing a fabulous job keeping everyone serviced and fed. The things that aren't right don't stop the whole cruise being enjoyable though. A few people are still wearing masks but the majority aren't. Life on board remains pretty much normal.

You certainly enjoy generally higher quality meals in the grills. But the additional room comfort, the additional staff services, access to the grills lounge and deck are all additional comforts and facilities you pay for aside from the food. In the end each decides if what they pay for in the grills is worth the higher cost.

We live in a new world where some foods are harder to source and that will apply to QG as well as Britannia dining room. Getting to full staff complement is tougher too, so we have to enjoy what we can within the available resources. I have to say that currently on board QM2 we have not had any cause for complaint, even if figs are not available for breakfast. There are plenty of other nice foods to enjoy instead.

Inevitably some people will be dishonest no doubt. But as more and more people have had Covid as well as high vaccination rates, then getting Covid again is less of a big deal. Of course some will be more vulnerable, but it is becoming more like the seasonal viruses like flu, and even though some get serious illness from flu every year we don't worry about it in daily life. I guess we will be moving to that kind of situation with Covid too.

Many have paid for tests in advance, including us. However we are moving now to the era of post Covid normality and I guess we'll see various changes in the coming months.

Aside from the webcam intrigue it was a lovely day there, and with the sea temperature around 28C, it was perfect for a long swim without getting the slightest bit cold after even an hour in the water. The tender operation was conducted superbly by all crew involved. Hearing gentle French and Italian voices in the many sea front cafes was fabulous too.

We have not had any problems connecting to the internet via the ship's WiFi. But it is quite slow, as expected. The food has been good, and it is really nice to have the violin trio and the harpist back playing at the entrance to the Britannia dining room on the two Gala nights. The sea state has been very slight ever since leaving Southampton so the ship has been beautifully smooth the entire time. The orchestra in the Queens Room has played some rather odd tempo music at times which makes it less than ideal for ballroom dancing, but the recorded music has generally been better. There are quite a lot of ballroom dancers on this voyage making for a generally good atmosphere in the Queens Room. Also it's a shame that they have had a comedian doing an hour in the middle of one evening in the Queens Room, who was very mediocre at best. That spoiled the evening somewhat. The pianist in the Commodore Club stops playing after 11pm, so there is less atmosphere than ideal for a late evening nightcap if you are used to having piano music there through to midnight in the past, which is a shame. But all in all a lovely cruise so far.

Around 2.15pm when our coach was one of two coaches that arrived about the same time. Large numbers of cars were arriving at that time too.

At the time we got to the terminal a large number of people were checking in at the same time, which led to the queues, and quite a while to get through security. Once on the ship it was fine though.

No they are not mandatory. Some people are wearing masks but most are not. You wouldn't know there was the possibility of Covid and nobody talks about it at all. It isn't an issue as far as we can tell, at least on this voyage at the moment.

A quick summary. Chaotic lengthy check-in, but life on board is close to pre-oandemic normal. Very smooth passage all the way across the Bay of Biscay for today's port of call in Cadiz, where it is sunny, hot with pleasant coolng breeze. Excellent meals in Britannia dining room, nice ballroom dancing in the Queens Room each evening, and people generally dressing smartly in the evenings with lots putting on their finery for the Gala evenings. So it feels very much like Cunard cruises always did.

I guess the time after which an inactive session is automatically logged off is a decision that the IT engineers make, and set it in their server parameters. to try to minimise the chance that too many people logged on at the same time might clog up the system. However that is different to leaving it to try to upload a picture and find it never completed the process and was logged out before it happened!

Sometimes saving each of those as a file (usually pdf file) and then printing each pdf file in a separate application where you open the saved file, can avoid the problems of printing from some browsers. It depends on what software you are running and whether you are using Microsoft Windows (and may depend on the version too), and also may depend on what protections you have for malware. Also sometimes if you have your phone set so that you can print from the phone, you may also be able to do it that way. Anyway just a few options you might try.

Good description of how demand relates to capacity. The limitation of the same kind at a smaller scale happens even at the home broadband level - say you have a connection with a download speed of 50 Mbps - and you start a laptop update which uses most of it. Another family member then wants to look at a Youtube video on their tablet, and another family member turns on the TV and wants to watch the Wimbledon tennis final in UHD. Something has to give way, and probably the high definition TV stream will take priority or it will stutter. Now scale that up, and say a few hundred passengers want to watch a video sent on WhatsApp showing the morning fun of their grandchild eating ice cream, and others want to upload the latest photos from the last trip ashore. I don't know the uplink/downlink maximum speed available to the satellite from the ship, but I bet that would be problematic, les alone the intranet capacity of the ship's ethernet cabling and switches, and wireless capacity over the whole set of access points around the ship. Providing an 'upgraded' service without the upgraded hardware capacity and available satellite link cannot work properly unless the system as a whole is designed and managed to deal with expected throughput. I am sure ew101 is aware of all these issues, and it would certainly be nice to hear from one of the Cunard's IT engineers what the real state of the whole system actually is and where the bottlenecks are. It would seem that passengers are largely reporting symptoms of a system that is being used beyond its limits. There will be times when less people are on the system, and those fewer people will then get a better performance from it. Yes, sending occasional email or text-only messages uses very few 'bits' but make that images, it gets more, and make that video and it gets a great deal more! Not many years ago we would pack the cases, and phone the kids, parents and friends to say we would be away at sea and out of contact till we got back, and give them the maritime emergency phone details to they could 'phone' the ship to pass emergency messages if a dire need arose, but other than that there would be no communication, no daily status updates, and no pictures whilst away. Times have certainly changed!

Also I guess that with a huge cash burn during the first year and a half of the pandemic, and reduced passenger income now, there may be a strong incentive for Cunard to limit expenditure to keep the books balanced. So perhaps is unlikely we will see any major work to upgrade the internet performance on board at least in the short term.

Yes good points. It would be interesting to know the satellite uplink/downlink capacity though. It that was already constraining the throughput, then having more nominal offerings of higher capacity for video messaging, with a lot more passengers now using video upload/download including video calling may put a severe strain on the system even if the satellite service was not affected by world events.

ew101: yes, and indeed you quote some sources that I have seen. One of the problems of the DDOS attacks, is that the attackers usually don't drive the software from their own machines, but often use AWS virtual machines, or compromised computers including innocent users of their own PCs, so tracking down the ip address from where the attack comes from often won't help, and the attackers have so many ip origins that they can push the attack for quite extended periods. So unless the C&C origin machine can be tracked down it is often hard to protect an attacked system, unless the administrator is very good at keeping logs of packets coming in and what the incoming stream is doing, and then blocking the source ip addresses as an ongoing firewall activity that has to be monitored and updated on an almost daily basis. I doubt if Cunard has that level of technical expertise working on each ship, IT systems, but I would love to be shown to be wrong. However I guess this is moving to a very technical set of posts, that is perhaps beyond what the cruise critic admins would like us to discuss at this level.

I have seen occasions where the ship mapping does not show up to date shipping positions - so I guess that positional data is also disrupted at some level. However the ships still have radar as well as their own GPS positioning and navigation, to stay safe.