vhradice

My phone will allow me to use it as a wifi hotspot. Can I buy an internet package from the cruise ship for 1 device, connect the phone to the internet using the package that I bought, set up the phone as a hotspot and then connect my other devices (laptop, ipad, ) using the phone hotspot to connect more that 1 device to the internet? I assume that I will have to disable the phone from using the cell phone service and only use the wifi for access. Can the cruise line detect that I am using the phone as a hotspot to connect multiple devices through the phone? I assume that the bandwidth would be shared by all devices.

Has anyone tried this?

I have been on several different ships with different lines and I have found these things:

Internet is usually reliable and the speeds on the ship do not vary much.

Wifi in ports is usually faster but you may need to pay for it.

RCCL surf speed ( .5 mbs) is slightly faster than the old dial-up speeds. Surf (5 mbs) is somewhat faster but still IMHO slower than other ships. IMHO RCCL is lying when they claim the Fastest Internet at Sea but that is hard to prove)

If my memory serves me well, the fastest I have had was on a Princess (Regal I think) at 48 mbs (almost as fast as my cable connection at home).

It all boils down to how bad do you want/need Internet at sea and are you willing to pay for it?

It would be interesting to start a topic where everyone would post the speeds as shown at www.speedtest.net for the ship and sailing date. This way people who are interested could find out real numbers.