HeyBud

Good point, the extra latency because of the satellite link makes two-way voice much worse.

What WiFi plan was required for your Facebook Messenger calls to work?

[bumping an old thread because I think it deserves an update]

First of all, the "Cellular at Sea" cell service is billed by your carrier like international roaming, so if you have a US carrier, chances are the data rates are too expensive to be used except in very limited amounts. For instance, w/o an international plan, my Verizon plan charges $2/MB, which is about 200 times more expensive than my domestic rate (4GB for $40). With the $40/month international plan, you only get 100MB of roaming data included, after that you pay $0.25 per MB. So for most people using cellular data while on board is not an option (my wife's aunt refused to follow our instructions to not watch TV shows on her iPhone, and racked up a $500 bill in less than two hours, before AT&T cut off both her international and domestic cellular data, figuring she didn't know what she was doing).

I can't say for certain that Viber calls would work with the Premium WiFi plan since I didn't try it, but I'm pretty confident that it would not work with the Social and Value plans. If it works at all, it most likely requires the Premium plan. The Premium plan does support Skype, and Viber calls use less bandwidth than Skype calls, so if Viber calls don't work, it's not a bandwidth limitation, it's a usage policy limitation. I did use Viber chat to keep in touch with our pet sitter during a recent cruise, and found that I needed to upgrade from the Social plan to the Value plan in order for Viber chat messages to get through.

FWIW, I did expedited service with overnight shipping each way and had my new passport back eight days from when I dropped my application at the Post Office. It was a renewal, and I had my old passport to send with my application. This was about a month ago.