Grand Princess Recent Internet Experience

[virtualmachine]

i took the grand from san francisco to alaska in august. overall i was quite pleased with the internet performance. it helps that after reading many forum comments my expectations were pretty low. i expected a flash back to unreliable dial-up days of the 1990's. actual performance was much, much better than dial-up. if you are expecting something like a fast wired internet connection you may be disappointed.

 

i did a couple of speed tests while at sea and was surprised that the speeds up and down were above 1 megabit per second. not fantastic but pretty darn good for a ship at sea. latency was in the 600-700 millisecond range. unavoidable given the satellite connection. a good wired connection will have latencies of 10-20 milliseconds. the high latency does cause some odd problems now and then (having to reload web pages, etc.).

 

i prepurchased the surf (middle) plan for $100 for a 10 day cruise. list price was $130. after reading the comments about ship internet i was skeptical and planning on going without. but then i researched my cell coverage in alaska and realized my carrier (ting) has very limited coverage there. i did not try any streaming sites like youtube, netflix, etc. at sea. apple icloud services were a mixed bag. imessage worked just fine. almost nothing else icloud related worked. no photo sync, no backups, no apple news. almost everything else seemed to work fine with the surf plan. websites, email, facebook, etc. all good.

 

the internet plan is for a single device at a time. you can switch the active device quite easily. instead of that, i bought a travel router and used that as my single device. then my wife and i just connected all our devices at the same time to the router. i left the router connected 24x7 and it worked fine whenever we were in the room. outside the room we used the free princess at sea website. wifi coverage throughout the ship seemed quite good. i don't remember having connection issues anywhere. the travel router is a tp-link tl-wr802n in case anybody is curious.

 

the non-internet related part of the cruise was very nice too! we definitely enjoyed seeing alaska for the first time!

[IndiTravler]

We purchased it. Does not live up to the billing of being able to stream or deal with VPN for work. Also had a lot of problems with the connection to the wi-fi dropping. But given the amount it was used, it was a better deal then minute based internet package.

[Haboob]

We purchased it. Does not live up to the billing of being able to stream or deal with VPN for work. Also had a lot of problems with the connection to the wi-fi dropping. But given the amount it was used, it was a better deal then minute based internet package.

 

Where was the ship?

 

If Alaska, that was Alaska: You lose your connection when the satellite in question goes and hides behind a

mountain. Worse, Princess is experimenting with "modern" internet outside the range of the "modern" satellites,

hoping that daily data caps will solve peak-use problems. And finding --no surprise-- they don't.

[IndiTravler]

Where was the ship?

 

If Alaska, that was Alaska: You lose your connection when the satellite in question goes and hides behind a

mountain. Worse, Princess is experimenting with "modern" internet outside the range of the "modern" satellites,

hoping that daily data caps will solve peak-use problems. And finding --no surprise-- they don't.

 

The ship was between SFO and Victoria/Vancouver. I don't think mountains were the problem.

[Haboob]

The ship was between SFO and Victoria/Vancouver. I don't think mountains were the problem.

 

That's worrisome since you were in range of the cheap, high-bandwidth satellites as well.

 

Using the same system and those satellites, Regal sucked down 1500 separate, simultaneous, full-up video

streams last February.