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Faster Internet


brmom
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  • 3 months later...

I have been on several different ships with different lines and I have found these things:

Internet is usually reliable and the speeds on the ship do not vary much.

Wifi in ports is usually faster but you may need to pay for it.

RCCL surf speed ( .5 mbs) is slightly faster than the old dial-up speeds. Surf (5 mbs) is somewhat faster but still IMHO slower than other ships. IMHO RCCL is lying when they claim the Fastest Internet at Sea but that is hard to prove)

If my memory serves me well, the fastest I have had was on a Princess (Regal I think) at 48 mbs (almost as fast as my cable connection at home).

It all boils down to how bad do you want/need Internet at sea and are you willing to pay for it?

It would be interesting to start a topic where everyone would post the speeds as shown at www.speedtest.net for the ship and sailing date. This way people who are interested could find out real numbers.

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Which Cruise Ships have the fastest internet service? I was ***** the Harmany Of The Seas and bought the Voom package and really enjoyed being able to use my laptop in my cabin.

 

 

Hi

 

I don't know too much about it, but with my limited knowledge, I would say none of the Carnival ships would qualify. :)

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Which Cruise Ships have the fastest internet service? I was ***** the Harmany Of The Seas and bought the Voom package and really enjoyed being able to use my laptop in my cabin.

If you are just checking email, most anything will do. If streaming videos, uploading photos, that's a different story.

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RCCL surf speed ( .5 mbs) is slightly faster than the old dial-up speeds. Surf (5 mbs) is somewhat faster but still IMHO slower than other ships. IMHO RCCL is lying when they claim the Fastest Internet at Sea but that is hard to prove)

 

0.5 MBPS (500 Kbps)is a LOT faster than dial up. You forget, dial up peaked at 56 Kbps. Two channel linked ISDN was 128 Kbps.

 

The problem with shipboard internet is not the data transfer speed, it is the ping. You can stream video, but some webpages take forever to load (like Amazon), because there are a LOT of individual elements, and your device requests each one, then has to wait for it to be sent.

 

I saw 250 - 280 ms pings, but others have reported 600+.

 

Remember, the ping goes from your device to the ship system to the satellite to the ground to that system to the internet to the site where the request is routed. And then return.

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Ship internet speed varies dramatically from hour to hour, based on a multitude of factors that are nearly impossible to predict, control, or manage.

 

A very few are predictable:

 

How far is the ship from the equator?

The satellites that provide Internet connection to nearly all cruise ships are in orbit above the equator. The further a ship sails away from the equator, the more atmosphere the signals need to travel through, at a steeper angle. This generally slows down speed.

 

How rough are the seas and how much is the ship moving?

If the ship is pitching and/or rolling, the satellite dishes up to keep re-adjusting their positions to get a good signal. If they are forced to do this a lot, the signal speed goes down.

 

A few are semi-predictable:

 

What are most of the passengers doing?

If it is prime dining or show time, most of the passengers will not be on the Internet. The speed will be higher.

If the ship is just arriving at the pier, or just departing the pier, most of the passengers will not be on the Internet. The speed will be higher.

 

What are most of the crew doing?

If they are on duty, they cannot use their discount cards to surf the net or call home. The speed will be faster. In the middle of the night, when many crew are off duty, it may be daytime at their homes. They use the system to call, Skype, and email their families. The system slows down.

 

How many repeater antennas does the ship have inside and outside, and how far away from them are you when you try to connect? These factors have a great effect on speed.

 

Is your ship's superstructure made of steel or aluminum? These have a huge effect on connectivity speed.

 

If you are trying to connect in your cabin, is the door open or closed. It sometimes makes a huge difference in speed.

 

Some are not very predictable:

 

The corporate cruise offices use the same bandwidth as you to send large files to the ship. Some are system upgrades, some are music. This slows the system.

 

The ship uses the same bandwidth as you to send large files to the corporate offices; passenger manifests, engine tests, medical records, daily reports from all departments, credit card transactions, casino operations.

Video conferencing with the head office also consumes major bandwidth. This really slows down the system.

 

Satellite telephone calls also the same limited bandwidth. Many cruise lines have special offers for passengers to use their own mobile telephones to call home. If many are doing it, the system slows down.

 

In some parts of the world, satellite capacity is pooled between 2 or 3 cruise ships in the same general area. Although your ship may not be using very much of the pooled bandwidth, one of the others may be using most of it. The system speed on your ship will suffer.

 

There are a hundred other factors that can affect your internet speed at sea; sunspots, solar winds, local thunder storms, mountains or trees blocking the signal at extreme Northern or Southern latitudes, or the funnel blocking the satellite dish just about anywhere, sailing at the extreme edge of the satellite's coverage footprint, or simply sailing in a area that has no satellite coverage. In some ports, local military radio traffic disrupts or blocks the satellite signal to the ship. In some countries, like Japan, C Band transmissions to and from foreign flag ships are illegal. If the ship does not have the far more expensive K Band antennas, the system stops completely.

 

As you can see, it is not so simple to just run a test and determine if a cruise ship has fast or slow internet. Whatever results you get, the speed may change by several hundred percentage points in a few minutes, hours, or days.

Edited by BruceMuzz
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I think we need to acknowledge that the non-answers above are a reflection of the reality that Internet service aboard cruise ships is so unimportant that a real answer is beyond anyone's ability to offer. For those who say "there are so many factors", keep in mind that there are some factors affecting Internet speed on land as well - not as many, but some - and yet there are still metrics that we can use to compare how fast, on average, one service is compared to another. If enough people cared enough about Internet service aboard ships, we'd know the QoS specs for their guest LAN and for the portion of their connection to the Internet that is devoted to passenger service. We would also have a chart somewhere where someone had compiled Speedtest.net results for each cruise ship averaged over hundreds of test runs. The fact that we don't have these comparisons isn't a reflection that no measurements are possible, but solely because there simply isn't enough interest in extracting the specs from the cruise lines and setting up what's needed to gather, average and present the test results.

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I think we need to acknowledge that the non-answers above are a reflection of the reality that Internet service aboard cruise ships is so unimportant that a real answer is beyond anyone's ability to offer. For those who say "there are so many factors", keep in mind that there are some factors affecting Internet speed on land as well - not as many, but some - and yet there are still metrics that we can use to compare how fast, on average, one service is compared to another. If enough people cared enough about Internet service aboard ships, we'd know the QoS specs for their guest LAN and for the portion of their connection to the Internet that is devoted to passenger service. We would also have a chart somewhere where someone had compiled Speedtest.net results for each cruise ship averaged over hundreds of test runs. The fact that we don't have these comparisons isn't a reflection that no measurements are possible, but solely because there simply isn't enough interest in extracting the specs from the cruise lines and setting up what's needed to gather, average and present the test results.

 

So start a thread to collect that data and post the spread sheet.

 

It does not exist because no one has done it. Not because no one wants to know.

 

But land based internet speed does not have the added issue of the satellite position relative to the ship. That will cause performance to vary quite a bit, even within a day on board.

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:cool:Will someone pay me to check the speeds on all the ships?

 

You beat me to this one. In the interests of science I was going to offer to test ALL of the ships wifi networks to see which one is the fastest. I will even write a paper afterward with my results and a PowerPoint presentation with lots of pretty graphs and such. I am willing to donate my time if someone will just book the cruises for me. I can start in two months when I retire.

 

In the interests of being thorough I should probably not just test each ship once. I am thinking twice, once for each of it's "seasons".

 

I'm just happy and willing to help. I'm a giver! :halo:

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So start a thread to collect that data and post the spread sheet.
I am one of those who I described as not interested enough to gather, collect and present that info.

 

You seem to have missed the point of my message, ie, that that would be what would be necessary to answer that question. Nothing more.

 

This message may have been entered via voice recognition. Please excuse any typos.

Edited by bUU
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