How’s the Internet …Really?

It’s a Frequently Asked Question: How do we get online? Is it really good enough?

And the honest answer is, usually. Let me explain.

The Basics

The ship’s connectivity is through the SpaceX Starlink satellite system. As far cruise ships specifically, that Wikipedia article notes that “Starlink Maritime became available in July 2022 providing internet access on the open ocean, with speeds of 350 Mbit/s, requiring purchase of a maritime-grade $10,000 user terminal and a $5,000 monthly service fee.” Ouch!

What it doesn’t say is what the monthly bandwidth limit is, and what happens if the ship goes over that limit. It also doesn’t say what changes if a ship has more than one such terminal installed. We have eight such terminals. Does that mean $40,000/month? Do we get faster than 350 Mbit/s? Is the monthly cap multiplied by 8?

None of these questions have been answered. At least, not to us Residents.

The “Internet” from the satellites is then fed into a large local area network with hundreds of WiFi access points spread throughout the ship. Pretty much, you can walk anywhere on the ship, inside or out, and your phone (or tablet) “won’t” lose its connection. But, see “Limitations” below.

The Promise

The Villa Vie web site still says “High-Speed Internet: Seamless Global Connectivity” (as well as “No Hidden Fees Or Extra Gratuities”). The Business Center page says it has “high-speed internet and modern amenities, it’s your global office at sea — ensuring productivity meets adventure effortlessly.”

A page about the ship goes in a little more detail: “The Business Center on Villa Vie Odyssey is free for residents to use, providing a convenient workspace. For those seeking more privacy, private offices are available, offering a dedicated space for your professional needs. Whether you’re finalizing a deal or brainstorming the next big idea, our Business Center ensures you stay connected and productive on your voyage.”

We have been told that VOIP services have been given priority in the network, so that if there is a heavy load into the satellite(s), WiFi phone calling, Zoom conference, and the like get bandwidth priority, the idea being that such business calls should get priority in order to make business use more reliable, which is certainly a reasonable goal.

The Limitations, Ship-Side

The practical reality of all of this is, get several hundred Residents aboard, plus crew, plus ship operations, and the satellites become a bottleneck. The Internet will slow down at times.

Everyone comes back aboard after a particularly great day ashore, and everyone’s phones find WiFi and then start uploading the day’s photos and videos? It’s guaranteed to slow to a crawl. Even “priority” calls and Zoom chats will be affected. That’s just the reality of such a system.

Tip For Residents: Turn off your phone’s photo/video backup! Whether it’s to Apple, Google Photos, Onedrive/Dropbox, whatever, turn it off! I sure did. And when I want to get photos off my phone, I simply (gasp!) plug a USB cable between my phone and computer and suck them over. Easy as that. </tip>

Too, virtually all cruise ships have metal walls and fire doors. Cabins, even if they have windows, essentially become Faraday cages with very little WiFi (which is by design on very high radio frequencies that don’t penetrate metal well at all) “leaking” into the cabins.

To fix that, there’s a second network that feeds the televisions in the cabins. That network not only brings in satellite TV channels (which are separate from the satellite Internet), but also Internet signals. Very cleverly, the TVs can be, and have been, configured as WiFi access points, thus bringing WiFi inside cabins.

The catch to this? The TV has to be on for the access point to be active. To me, that’s a terrible design flaw. The workaround, so you don’t have to have the glow in your cabin at all times, is that there’s an “eco mode” that allows the screen to be turned off.

The Limitations, Starlink-Side

Starlink is not ubiquitous. Let’s start with their coverage map, where bright blue is access, darker blue within the light blue areas is “waitlist” (highly impacted areas with lots of demand), dark blue is “coming soon” (waiting for more satellites or regulatory approval), and dark gray (e.g., Russia, China) is …well… unmentioned, but your intuition that these areas coverage is “probably not available” is undoubtedly correct:

As I understand it, international waters aren’t really keyed black, as seems to be shown, as far as coverage is concerned; call it very likely light blue (yay!), except for Antarctica and probably the Arctic (boo!). But within the territorial waters off the countries in dark gray? Well, call coverage there “not guaranteed.”

We found out this morning that there are places where we just aren’t going get service, even when not near a communist country. Take, for instance, Bonaire, the middle (alphabetically) of the “ABC Islands” in the Caribbean, with the other two being Aruba and Curaçao. We woke up this morning to no Internet. The company got on the phone and found that Bonaire simply refused to license Starlink in their territory, full stop, which is bad for the country in that some cruise ships will surely refuse to come here just because of that.

What happens in Aruba and Curaçao remains to be seen; all three are protectorates of the Netherlands, though I “hear” that Bonaire is more independent than the others, so …well… “we’ll see” in the morning, when we arrive in Curaçao. I “expect” that we will have Starlink service in between in any case during the overnight hours.

My Own Use Case

For example, as an online publisher I generally need online access daily for research, posting to Facebook, getting order emails, interacting with readers, etc. Things get quite intense on Sundays (when I write This is True, get submissions from contributors — which sometimes takes some back and forth — and research questions as I write) and Mondays (when I research and write the Honorary Unsubscribe, other parts of the Premium newsletter, and — of course! — send it out).

It actually doesn’t use much bandwidth to send it out: software feeds the elements of the newsletter to one of my servers, and loads in the list of recipients; then the server has software that does a “mailmerge” of those components, and connects with an Email Service Provider to do the actual deliveries, so really the server is what needs bandwidth, and it has a nice wide pipe for its job.

But obviously, I need some connectivity with my server to provide it the ingredients. My backup in case of ship Internet failure is my phone, which has an international plan which covers me in most, but not all, countries, and the plan allows for the phone to be a hotspot to use that bandwidth. Though for Bonaire, it provided phone coverage …but not Internet.

I instituted a backup to the backup: a second international phone plan with a different carrier: one I knew had service on Bonaire. (For those of you who know how to pronounce the port city we are in: Kralendijk.) After getting online Sunday and getting a lot of that work done, it too failed — it simply kicked me off. Rumor was that everyone with AT&T-based phone service lost their connection, so perhaps that’s the carrier contract the second company uses here, and sometimes “stuff happens.”

Between the two there should be coverage in “most” countries. I’ll find out with more use if it’s worth keeping it as a secondary backup. If so, I’ll update the phone page linked above.

So the ship’s Internet failed (intentional provider outage), my backup failed, and my backup’s backup failed. I resigned myself to having to go ashore, finding a restaurant to park in that had WiFi for customers, and paying “rent” by having dinner there as I worked.

To make that efficient, I worked in my office to do everything else I needed to do before packing up. That means laying everything out for my software, etc.

Rescued

Until! Until I heard the voice of the company’s Hospitality Manager in the bullpen of the office area, and one word that he spoke caught my attention: “hotspot.” You won’t be surprised that I went out to offer my assistance, because I certainly knew what that was.

Sure enough, Oliver was setting up a cell-based hotspot [this one *], which was pretty much guaranteed to work because it was bought locally, here on Bonaire, at one of the local cell company’s stores. And I can see a cell tower through my office window! I helped him get it going, and asked if it was OK if I used it for a bit to get some work done.

“Not at all,” he said. “I got this for everyone at the Business Center who had work to do!”

I was actually boggled: the company did this at their own expense for those of us who work on board. That, dear readers, is absolutely amazing service! It is well after 9:00 p.m. (we leave at 10:00), and it’s still working while others are doing activities or heading to bed.

Best of all, what happens when (not if) this happens again? They don’t have to buy it again, they simply have to send someone ashore to a phone store to buy a new SIM, pop it in, and get it set up again. Except maybe in China, well known for its “Great Firewall”.

And hopefully that won’t be needed on a Sunday again, because we had to wait until Monday to get it. (We were scheduled for two days on Bonaire, Sunday and Monday — my two big working days.)

And I have to say, I’m impressed with the company’s initiative. I never had to pack up and drag my computer ashore, which I’m loathe to do because that puts it at risk of theft. Though I was heartened to hear from Residents who did go ashore that they felt like this was a wonderfully safe place.

Bottom Line

So how’s the Internet aboard …really? For me, the vast majority of time: Satisfactory!

But if you plan to stream a lot of movies, upload big videos to Youtube, or do online gaming — or other things that use a lot of bandwidth — your mileage may vary. It does get busy. Sometimes there’s a brief “skip” that interrupts video conferences, or disconnects completely and you have to reconnect. It’s simply the nature of satellite Internet, especially when the user antennas are mounted atop a tall, unstable, moving structure.

As noted above, I don’t know how much the Internet is costing the company, but they have indicated it’s coming in well above budget.

I will not be surprised if they decide that everyone gets a specific allotment per month, and if specific individuals go over that, they’ll have to pay by the GB for the extra. I doubt the average Resident will break whatever that allotment will be, especially if they take my advice above and turn off automatic photo/video uploading from their phones. (Hint, hint!)

For those doing business here, especially those of us who are paying for office space, I believe we will get a significant additional allotment.

And I expect an additional-additional allotment for those who are doing significant activity online that promotes the only workable solution for those interested in Residential Cruising: our company. I definitely don’t just mean this site, but also several other blogs and Youtube channels run by Residents (see the “Blogs” tab in the top menu for a list of them).

The company really is doing its part to make onboard Internet as good as possible, and they deserve the credit for working to Make It So.

Update: Just 15 minutes after pulling away from Bonaire, Starlink was up and running just fine, and continues to work in Curaçao.

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Randy Cassingham

Randy is the co-founder of Residential Cruising, and is best known as the founder of the oldest entertainment feature on the Internet, This is True. He and his wife, Kit, live full-time on the Residential Cruising ship Villa Vie Odyssey, where they are “Digital Nomads” — continuing their work while living aboard the ship.

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