COMMUNICATION: Who Wants Cell Service At Sea???

[michmike]

all you have to do is look at how rude and obnoxious people are with cell phones in everyday life. What makes you think they are going to be any different on board? And I'm not sure the cost will be a sufficient limiting factor.

 

I'd have no problem with it if they would work in cabins only, but I certainly don't want them in public areas.

 

For all those who maintain that the world can't revolve w/o them, I'll share a story I've told a number of times since retiring..

 

I ran the foodservice operation in 2 state prisons for 25 yrs, serving 6000 meals a day between them and then one day I retired ... and guess what??

 

The next morning, they served breakfast.. without me..

 

Cell phones aboard ship are a bad idea.. period.

[TIMELMAN]

I think it will be to expensive to use much of the time. but i have done told my family if something happens while i am gone . i will see them 7 days later. i dont have to be at their bed side or grave side for them to know i love them. so the emergency argument goes out the window. you can always call from port. this is vacation after all!

[WNYCRUISER]

Hi, a guy from the stone age here. Don't own a cell phone. Don't feel a need for one. DW has one that we use for emergencies. OUR emergency, not someone else's. I cannot for the life of me understand the mentality of "I need to be able to get ahold of....." I can't be away from my business for an entire day without them being able to contact me....."

 

Wake up and smell the coffee. NO ONE is that indispensible. Let's take an example. You are getting ready for your 7 day cruise and have packed your cell phone for "your" intended purpose. Because Lord forbid, life will stop if you don't have your cell phone. Now on the way to the pier, you are in a horrific car accident, and as a result, you are in a coma for 7 days!:eek: Now how exacly is someone going to contact you then???? Will your business persons have a meeting and decide, well, Johnny is in a coma, we can't run the business without calling him/him calling us on his cell phone, so we have made the command decision to close the doors for good. I don't think so.

 

If someone NEEDS to get hold of you, the ship offers several options for this. If you feel the NEED to get ahold of someone back home, the ship offers options for you as well. I learned the hard way (very hard way) how indispensible one can become in their own minds.

 

I offer this as a compromise.....Leave the existing phones in the cabins, and change the rate from $16.00 per minute to $2.49 per minute. You can sit in your cabin and talk all you want, and the public areas won't be cluttered with indispensible people.

[WNYCRUISER]

OT but we're finally getting a mandatory "hands off" cell phone law while driving vehicles here in Calif. effective JUL 07. It's going to cut back on a lot of traffic collisions!

 

Don't count on it Copper. We have had the law in New York for quite some time, and I only see the habit increasing. Very difficult to enforce.

And the biggest offenders are the young kids who have the phones surgically implanted in their heads, and coincidentally the ones with the least amount of driving experience. Add to it the 1000 pounds of stereo equipment blasting at unmeasurable decibles and you have a recipe for disaster.

[kryos]

When they first put phones on the seatbacks in airplanes there were lots of dire predictions about the mayhem that would result when irate seatmates started reacting to the obnoxious boor next to him chattering away for the entire flight. I just read recently that the service is being discontinued. Not enough users to be profitable. The price was about $4 per minute if I recall.

I think in all the flights I've taken I've only observed one person, on one of those flights, use the phone ... and that was because his traveling companion was ill and he needed to make sure someone was at the airport to pick them up. I guess maybe he was taking her straight to the doctor?

 

Just like with the phones on the airplanes, I have no doubt that cell service at sea will NOT be abused. First of all, there's the added cost. For non-essential calls, I am sure people will just wait until they arrive in port and make their calls from there ... possibly even being able to use their normal minutes allotment for them. Secondly, you have to consider that even those passengers, like myself, who would welcome the availability of a cell phone for emergencies aren't going to want to be surgically attached to them. After all, we are on a cruise to have fun too, don't ya think?

 

I think people are getting all bent out of shape about what is going to amount to a total non-issue. The cell phone service will only be available in certain areas of the ship. People needing to make a call or check their voice mail will need to go to those areas in order to do so. You won't have people yakking away in the Lido or getting calls during the show. It just ain't gonna happen.

 

Blue skies ...

 

--rita

[kryos]

I ran the foodservice operation in 2 state prisons for 25 yrs, serving 6000 meals a day between them and then one day I retired ... and guess what??

 

The next morning, they served breakfast.. without me..

Sometimes it's not the employee who thinks they are dispensible, but rather the employer. Until maybe the last five years, we had a strict policy in the IT department of the company where I work. All people going on vacation had to provide their immediate superior with a contact number. It would only be used in the direst of emergencies, but there absolutely had to be a way to contact an employee if it was absolutely necessary.

 

Fortunately, back in the day when this policy was in force, I wasn't cruising. But if it was in force today, I'd either have to be reachable, or couldn't cruise.

 

Now in the case of an employer, heck with them. If they want to contact me, they can pay the ship to shore rates. I wouldn't have a problem with that. But, in the case of a family emergency, I would definitely want to be easily reachable, at a phone number my family is familiar with. True, there might not be much I could do about a death or major illness of a close relative, but I'd sure want to be the one to make the decision of whether or not to abandon my cruise at the next port ... and not have that decision made for me by circumstance.

 

I don't know why everyone's getting so bent out of shape over cell phones. Did people get this upset when cruise lines installed WiFi service? What's the difference? Do you like to necessarily be surrounded by a bunch of people tapping the keys of their laptops for hours on end?

 

Blue skies ...

 

--rita

[AAAAmerican]

I saw this posted elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

We all saw this coming.

 

 

It was posted as soon as the wire had it ..

HAL guests and prospective guests should know.

 

 

When I go on land vacations I search for places without phones...

 

An example when I am up in Vancouver, BC I stay at a Hotel without phones. .. I do get FAXes under my door or on the front desk when I return.

 

A 5 star (I call it this) YUMMERY is attached... a good walk from Lions Gate Bridge...

 

CELL Phones in my residence state of New Jersey has so many ABUSERS on the roadways... a head set and mike are so important especially when driving a few municipalites have outlwaed there usages when driving too, but like many laws they are utterly unenforced... that to me is abismal.

 

 

Cellular communication not those THOUSAND Minutes many have is most important the usage ability not the volume...

 

On a ship it has to be done in only certain areas as SHIPS and STEEL do not allow certain wavelengths... T^~^~^^~^~~~~T

 

So yes rooms with a Balcony (Veranda) will be priced at a premium.. CELLULAR Available Rooms...

 

The will do what they have done in Tunnels EG: Lincoln Tunnel from NJ to NYC midtown..

 

Copper Wiring was installed to be a wave carrier... Yes using your CELL ? PDA/ Notebook while driving through one of the three tubes..

 

Ships will probably have certain areas for usages as the do for centralised Internet Usage..

 

etc..etc... Cost is only very relative to the person using it.. Will Teens care?

 

So another grouping of subjective subjects is coming to the BB now more here...:cool:

 

As I have mentioned before the Noordams FULL COmmunications for public usage was out not just for me but other trips prior and since..

 

 

That was when DUK:NYSE did the biggest merge ever..

 

Did youall see CCL earnings yesterday? That per berth profit now is astoundingly well in print!

[cruznon]

Obviously, I'm in the minority. I would like to have cell service available. I also think there should be areas of the ship where cell service is not available so others aren't disturbed.

( I had no idea so many people were upset by cell phone usage.)

[michmike]

Rita - I can usually count on being on the same page as you (like your style) but have to differ on this one. There's a big difference in the intrusion level of someone talking on a cell phone as opposed to tapping on a keyboard.

 

As for family emergencies, I'm not sure it makes all that much difference as you generally find yourself in a position to do little about it while onboard. I spose you COULD arrange to fly home from the next port of call.

 

Just a personal experience - about 15 yrs ago we were on a family vacation out in the finger lakes area with no set itinerary. We were gone 10 days. Got home and I tried for 2 days to contact my parents. (this is before cell phones and we didn't even own an answering machine at that point). Finally a light went off that perhaps something had happened to my grandmother , so I called there and sure enough, the funeral had been 2 days earlier. They had no idea how to track us down (spose they COULD have contacted the NY state police) and so went on w/o us.

 

I was disappointed in not being able to have been there, but had visited often when she was with us and she knew how I felt about her, so ultimately that was all that mattered.

 

In the big scheme of things, would it have changed much if I'd had a cell and been able to come rushing home? I'm not so sure.

 

Cruising again in 3 weeks and hoping not to be subjected to all that "can you hear me now" nonsense.

[Krazy Kruizers]

We never take our cell phone on a trip with us.

 

[Krazy Kruizers]

I think if we start to hear cell phones ringing all over the ship, that's when we will quit cruising.

[kryos]

Cruising again in 3 weeks and hoping not to be subjected to all that "can you hear me now" nonsense.

Thanks for the nice words.

 

As far as this cell service is concerned, I think we should both just wait and see how it plays out. I have a feeling it's gonna be an okay situation all around. Passengers won't be disturbed by the "can you hear me now nonsense," as you put it ... because the service is not gonna be available shipwide, but only in certain areas. You can simply avoid those areas since they will probably be places you wouldn't normally frequent anyway ... such as the lower level of the atrium ... where there are only a couple of offices. That is one of the places where WiFi is available now.

 

And, if we are really lucky ... and I would have absolutely no problem with this, and in fact would prefer it ... HAL will install the necessary hardware for the cell service only in the cabins. If that's the case, you won't even see another passenger's cell phone, let alone hear it, unless the ship is in port.

 

I say let's wait and see. I think this whole cell phone thing is gonna turn out to be one big non-issue.

 

Blue skies ...

 

--rita

[Krazy Kruizers]

:et's hope so -- we have a couple of restaurants that do not allow cell phones or pages. One restaurant makes it very clear - phone or pager goes off - you won't be back there to dine.

[Bramcruiser]

Although cell phones are handy in an emergency I must admit the misuse of them drive me crazy. I see far too many people on the commuter train every day going to and from work feeling like they have to call everyone they know - whether its work related or not - just to keep from getting bored. Add the people on the street involved in meaningless conversations and those in the malls and other public spaces and you get a world that seems like it can't do without.

 

However, having it with you 24/7 also makes you susceptible to being on call. The point of a vacation is simply to get away from it all and there is no way I want my office to follow me. I suspect my SO will be taking a cell phone along but we usually only use it for emergencies or when we come back and have arrangements for someone to pick us up at the airport. Otherwise, we keep it off and don't drag it with us everywhere we go. Therefore, to get back to the main point of the OP, we have no real need for cell service on the ship. Much prefer my quiet days relaxing on the deck of the ship.

 

David

[bdmarine]

Nobody yet has mentioned the use of cell phones for passengers to call each other on the same ship. DW can get me in the bar or the casino for example. Kids can report to their parents, etc. At two bucks a minute, many of us could easily afford thirty or forty bucks a day on trivial intra-ship calls.

[Grumpy1]

Uh Oh, the last post made me think of walkie-talkies and that made me think about the Nextel cellphones in walkie talkie mode... Those are extremely annoying in public... although I've overhead some juicy tidbits.:eek:

[noblepa]

I don't see how cell phone use could be limited to only the cabins.

 

If you look at the deck plans of HAL ships, there is almost no public area that does not have cabins on a deck immediately above or below that point. If cell phone coverage is extended to those cabins, it will, of necessity spill over into the public area.

 

I also don't think that the cost will deter people. It only takes a few abusers to make life miserable for the rest. There are some people who can afford $2.49 per minute, without batting an eye. There are some whose cell phone is paid for by their employer. There will be some who have never cruised before and don't realize the cost (they're in for a big surprise when their next monthly bill arrives-"How the &^%# did the bill get to be $450?").

 

In 2004, before we discovered HAL, we took a cruise on the Carnival Glory. We left Miami for the first stop in Key West. Since we were hugging the coastline all the way down, cell phones, at least on the shoreward side of the ship continued to work. There were some teenagers in the cabin next to us who talked almost constantly on their cell phone, usually on their balcony. Their loud voices made it difficult for us to enjoy our own balcony. Those and other teenagers (some adults, too) also used them a lot on the Lido deck, where reception was not blocked by the steel of the ship.

 

In short, its coming. There's nothing we can do about it. It will be just as obtrusive as it is anywhere else. It only takes one or two fools in the dining room or show lounge to spoil things. Get used to it.

 

I have no doubt that many, including most posters here, will be courteous and use their cell phones only in their cabins or other private areas. Those are the people who already turn their phones off in theaters and don't use them in restaurants, or while driving. Those who do use them in theaters and restaurants and who do talk while driving will continue to do so at sea, now that they can.

 

I must admit that we take ours with us, but they stay in the cabin when we're aboard. We took them ashore on our Mexican Riviera cruise last April. I figured that, if my wife and I got separated, she could call me and say "I'm in front of the cathedral", or more likely "I'm in the Diamonds International store" and we could hook up.

 

Paul Noble

[jimmy2x]

There is no need for it plus I think it's a bad idea! There are currently ways to get a hold of pax in case of an emergency. The only people IMO that should be wearing cell phones on a ship are certain members of the crew (those in key positions and first responders) and they don't even do it. They're still wearing pagers

 

OT but we're finally getting a mandatory "hands off" cell phone law while driving vehicles here in Calif. effective JUL 07. It's going to cut back on a lot of traffic collisions!

 

It better be more effective than in New Jersey. As a salesman, I am on the road there every day - have not seen any cut back in using the phones while driving. For some people it does not seem to be a problem. Others should not be on the road anyway - the old saw about walking a chewing gum!

[twinkletoes4445]

We own a small business, and I think if we could get cell phone service on the ship, I might be able to get hubby to cruise more often. I know he can check his e-mail from the ship, but sometimes there are things that come up and he has to deal with it right then and there. That's the downside of owning your own business. But thankfully, we have a son who is now also in the business, and I am looking forward to the day when he can deal with the issues (when they come up).

[serendipity1499]

I don't see how cell phone use could be limited to only the cabins.

 

If you look at the deck plans of HAL ships, there is almost no public area that does not have cabins on a deck immediately above or below that point. If cell phone coverage is extended to those cabins, it will, of necessity spill over into the public area.

 

I also don't think that the cost will deter people. It only takes a few abusers to make life miserable for the rest. There are some people who can afford $2.49 per minute, without batting an eye. There are some whose cell phone is paid for by their employer. There will be some who have never cruised before and don't realize the cost (they're in for a big surprise when their next monthly bill arrives-"How the &^%# did the bill get to be $450?").

 

In 2004, before we discovered HAL, we took a cruise on the Carnival Glory. We left Miami for the first stop in Key West. Since we were hugging the coastline all the way down, cell phones, at least on the shoreward side of the ship continued to work. There were some teenagers in the cabin next to us who talked almost constantly on their cell phone, usually on their balcony. Their loud voices made it difficult for us to enjoy our own balcony. Those and other teenagers (some adults, too) also used them a lot on the Lido deck, where reception was not blocked by the steel of the ship.

 

In short, its coming. There's nothing we can do about it. It will be just as obtrusive as it is anywhere else. It only takes one or two fools in the dining room or show lounge to spoil things. Get used to it.

 

I have no doubt that many, including most posters here, will be courteous and use their cell phones only in their cabins or other private areas. Those are the people who already turn their phones off in theaters and don't use them in restaurants, or while driving. Those who do use them in theaters and restaurants and who do talk while driving will continue to do so at sea, now that they can.

 

I must admit that we take ours with us, but they stay in the cabin when we're aboard. We took them ashore on our Mexican Riviera cruise last April. I figured that, if my wife and I got separated, she could call me and say "I'm in front of the cathedral", or more likely "I'm in the Diamonds International store" and we could hook up. Paul Noble

 

Hope you are wrong Paul, but suspect you might be right.:( .

 

Incidentally we have walkie-talkies, which we only take ashore to find each other in case we became separated..I'm cheap & would rather spend my $$$ on something else rather than cell phone calls..

 

I lost my DH for over an hour and a half in ROM::eek: He's like the wind which disappears at the worst possible time (as when we raced our Sailboat) ...Since then, I insist we take our walkie talkies with us! Now if he would only remember to turn it on:rolleyes: But that's another story..LOL

 

However, we never use them on the ship!

 

Happy Cruising Everyone..:) Betty

[hammybee]

I lost my DH for over an hour and a half in ROM::eek: He's like the wind which disappears at the worst possible time (as when we raced our Sailboat) ...Since then, I insist we take our walkie talkies with us! Now if he would only remember to turn it on:rolleyes: But that's another story..LOL However, we never use them on the ship!

Happy Cruising Everyone..:) Betty

 

Maybe I am married to your DH's long lost brother. His sense of direction does not exist. I tell him that if his instincts tell him to turn left, he should resist and do the opposite.

[Copper10-8]

Maybe I am married to your DH's long lost brother. His sense of direction does not exist. I tell him that if his instincts tell him to turn left, he should resist and do the opposite.

 

 

I always thought that "temporary loss of directional beacons" was a female "problem":D

(back in my slip trench, awaiting incoming)

[arzz]

NO, NO, NO to cell phones -- not due to any ability to communicate less expensively, but to their instrusion on the sacred space of MY CRUISE!

 

They would be OK if they only worked in your own cabin.

 

However, to the ever cash hungry cruise lines, in line with Sail's "ala carte" cruise proposal of this morning, this is another good example of a way for the cruise lines to increase that bottom line!

[k8russ8]

I am all for progress. I suppose cell phones have their place. It seems to be an addiction for some. I am an independent contractor. I need my cell phone for my job. I will not let it rule me on vacation. My greatest fears are the people that choose to break the rules. Would these phone junkies really be able to speak only in designated areas? I suppose as in all other venues, time will tell. Cell at sea? Not for me.

K8

[twinkletoes4445]

I am all for progress. I suppose cell phones have their place. It seems to be an addiction for some. I am an independent contractor. I need my cell phone for my job. I will not let it rule me on vacation. My greatest fears are the people that choose to break the rules. Would these phone junkies really be able to speak only in designated areas? I suppose as in all other venues, time will tell. Cell at sea? Not for me.

K8

 

I would love to not have to deal with cell phones on vacations...but it's just a fact of life for us. I would really love nothing more than to just get away from it all...and we used to be able to do that when hubby worked for a company, but that all changed when we started our own business (you're lucky you have one that you can get away from). One time, we had a truck driver that had a heat attack while hauling a piece of our equipment. Thank God, he survived, and no other motorists were injured, but we were fined $5,000 a day for every day that piece of equipment was delayed. So things can get quite costly for us when things go wrong. We're a young company, and I do have every hope that one day...we can just chuch all the communication things and go away...and not be bothered by anyone.

 

If they do have cell phone coverage on ships...I personally hope that they would require people to talk only in their cabins or on the decks.

 

And we aren't "phone junkies." I'd love to leave them behind. But it just isn't possible for us. :(

 

I'm one of those people that never uses all their minutes. I really hate the things. I also wish every state would ban the use while driving. I been almost creamed a couple of times, and both times, there was someone yakking away on their phone. I just wish people would lover their voices when using the thing. We were on a flight a couple of weeks ago, and this guy behind us was yakking about sports stuff, and it was like I was carrying on a conversation with him. The flight attendant practically had to take the phone from him. He waited until she asked him a couple of times before getting off the thing.

 

It would be nice for us to have phone coverage...but on the other hand, I really hate the thought of listening to phones ringing in the dining room and the theaters...and you know they will. I make hubby keep his on "vibrate" when we are out and about. I don't even want to hear it ring. But it would be nice to be able to cruise more often.