Internet prices going up?

[twangster]

Princess rolled out O3b to the fleet and is currently known for having the fastest internet at sea.  O3b uses medium earth orbiting satellites that are closer to the earth and therefore have lower latency making the internet seem more responsive.  

 

Royal Caribbean also uses O3b on some of their ships, mostly the newer ones, but Royal caps each user to ~4Mb down and ~2Mb up so while they use the same provider and technology as Princess, Princess is faster since Princess doesn't cap each user.  Older Royal Caribbean ships have internet that sucks compared to Princess but relative to Carnival's older ships blows them out of the water.

 

Carnival is all over the place.  Some of the newer ships have technology that will leverage land connections in select places like near Amber Cove or while in Port Canaveral pre-departure.  Once at sea it's a hodgepodge of stuff using legacy satellite technology.  All of the older ships just suck.  Sometimes the newer ships will be okay and at other times they will suck too.  It's very difficult to predict what user experiences will be on Carnival because there are so many variables in play.  They do block wifi calling though so regardless you'll not likely get wifi calling through a cellular provider but can sometimes get other services like google voice to work but even that is variable on the newest ships. 

 

In summary, Carnival internet sucks most of the time, is better maybe on newest ships part of the time and is a disgrace on older ships.

 

NCL is all over the map and can be mired in bucket of minute plans on some ships and that really sucks.

[CruisingFromLA]

3 hours ago, n6uqqq said:

 

I am guessing the main reason for speed differences is Princess cruisers probably tend to be older and not married to their phones and internet so the number of users at any given time would be much less.

 

Except at 4am when everyone is still asleep, I was still getting 0.15 Mbps upload speeds on the Panorama on the premium plan. It is bad no matter the time or how many people are connected to it. In addition, when I was on the Radiance it was like at 40% occupancy and the internet was just as bad.

[n6uqqq]

6 hours ago, CruisingFromLA said:

 

Except at 4am when everyone is still asleep, I was still getting 0.15 Mbps upload speeds on the Panorama on the premium plan. It is bad no matter the time or how many people are connected to it. In addition, when I was on the Radiance it was like at 40% occupancy and the internet was just as bad.

Well then that is rather lame 😉  especially the Panorama being one of the newest in the fleet.

Edited April 27, 2022 by n6uqqq