Zoom on Celebrity wifi???

[chamima]

Does anyone have any experience with Zoom working on Celebrity wifi?

 

[Alakegirl]

A search turned of this, and there were other threads as well so if you do research you can probably find more

 

[Jim_Iain]

I've used it a number of times without problems using the Premium WiFi.    There are times that the ship has lost all internet service and of course at this time was not able to use Zoom.

 

Usually I have not had any buffering but a couple times i switched to Voice only.

[Honolulu Blue]

I confess that when I saw this post, I initially forgot about the 2020 App of the Year and went back to my childhood for the PBS show and its catchy theme song.

 

Sorry.  Distraction over.  Carry on. 🤪

[MamaFej]

29 minutes ago, Honolulu Blue said:

I confess that when I saw this post, I initially forgot about the 2020 App of the Year and went back to my childhood for the PBS show and its catchy theme song.

 

Sorry.  Distraction over.  Carry on. 🤪

And now that song is in my head.

 

Gee, thanks. 

[NutsAboutGolf]

 

How will you handle your zoom call if there are temporary freezes and/or you get disconnected and cannot rejoin for several minutes?

 

Odds are you can successfully have a zoom call but if there are seriously consequences due to getting disconnected (like your job depends on it), you should skip it

 

There are way too many variables like does the ship have Starlink, what time of day, how long is the zoom call, the itinerary, etc

Edited December 28, 2022 by NutsAboutGolf

[chamima]

4 minutes ago, NutsAboutGolf said:

 

How will you handle your zoom call there are temporary freezes and/or you get disconnected and cannot rejoin for several minutes?

 

Odds are you can successfully have a zoom call but if there are seriously consequences due to getting disconnected (like your job depends on it), you should skip it

 

There are way too many variables like does the ship have Starlink, what time of day, how long is the zoom call, the itinerary, etc

 

 

Thanks for the concern.

I currently take several classes on Zoom where i am a participant - not the teacher. We will be on the Equinox for all of February and i was just wondering about the viability  of continuing to  participate in these classes. They  are 1  to 2 hours long each.

It sounds like I may actually be able to do it.

[NutsAboutGolf]

6 minutes ago, chamima said:

 

 

Thanks for the concern.

I currently take several classes on Zoom where i am a participant - not the teacher. We will be on the Equinox for all of February and i was just wondering about the viability  of continuing to  participate in these classes. They  are 1  to 2 hours long each.

It sounds like I may actually be able to do it.

 

One downside to the 'Nox is it won't have Starlink until the end of the next year but I would imagine you should be fine on the zoom call as long as it isn't during a peak time.  Generally 20ish mins before and after the start of lunch and dinner its very congested.  You will definitely want to ensure you purchase the premium internet

[awesomefat]

I was on the celebrity beyond last week (3/19/23 - 3/26/23) and found zoom to be unusable if I was the presenter.  I am a computer science professor, so know a little bit about tech, and I tried to give three 50 minute lectures during the cruise and the students could not understand me at all.  I did some testing and found that the upload speed was very limited (around 0.5 Mbps)  which would be the conduit by which my audio is transmitted.

 

The real question is whether this is related to the internet source (Star Link) or the Network setup on Celebrity Beyond where they are perhaps giving priority to certain applications and throttling upload bandwidth to improve the overall experience across the ship.  It does appear that it has been more common for Star Link speeds overall to be slower since late 2022 as more and more total people have adopted Star Link.  I will note that there is a youtube channel I follow that uses star link currently to do their live streams and it seems to work well.  They are using the stationary Star Link rather than the ones the cruise ships use to stay connected while moving.  So I may not be comparing apple to apples there.

 

I will note that the previous week we were on the Holland America Nieuw Statendam where I was able to meet over zoom without problem, yet streaming services like youtube were nearly unusable even though I did have the premium streaming internet package.  Interestingly, youtube worked perfectly fine on the Celebrity Beyond, while zoom was unusable.  I do have a suspicion that these differences are at least in part related to Celebrity's network decisions since I also noticed that if you tried to visit a competitor website (like princess.com) it was borderline unusable while at the same moment, the celebrity website was very usable.  Perhaps a coincidence and I did not look into that further, but it was an observation I made.

 

Long story short, I would maybe not trust Star Link on a cruise ship for zoom based on my experience, but overall internet did seem to be an improvement over traditional cruise ship internet.

[Z'Loth]

Please see this detailed post that I wrote in November, 2021 that I wrote in the Cruising Technology board. Online conference services are very bandwidth hungry especially when it comes to audio and video, and the ship may implement network policies to limit how much traffic can be sent/received to a device, especially considering the connection to the Internet is via satellite.