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Status of Ocean Medallion?


denamo
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Haven't seen any recent reports of the Ocean Medallion program on the Regal Princess being expanded on the ship. Wondering what the progress is.

 

Anyone out there have recent knowledge? Know if it is being used to request items as marketed?

 

Thanks in advance.

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Haven't seen any recent reports of the Ocean Medallion program on the Regal Princess being expanded on the ship. Wondering what the progress is.

 

Anyone out there have recent knowledge? Know if it is being used to request items as marketed?

 

Thanks in advance.

Doesn’t seem much going on.

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I recall seeing several workers wearing blue jumpsuits with "Ocean Medallion" patches or other swag on the Star last December after her drydock. There were even a few "techy" looking chaps on the Ruby this last march walking around with laptops with similar swag, but not in jumpsuits. If anything, it seems like the group is still around and has a different working group than most other PCL staff. One of the guys on the Star was sitting in Shooters late one night watching football really going through the scotches and cigars with what sounded like coworkers, either ***** or not. He seemed a bit frustrated with the program, but didn't say anything memorable.

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My TA has been on the Regal the last week or two. She let me know that there were major problems and no Internet the entire cruise. An upgrade is being installed today or tomorrow.

 

Wow no internet the entire cruise how awful for those of us who must work while we cruise. Next one is on Royal and guess I should be happy they have delayed ***** for forseeable future

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Princess is definitely having technical problems with the network infrastructure. They are using a different satellite service for the internet connection that may not be all that robust. It sounds like while not implemented on any other ship, they are working on the infrastructure on certain other ships who recently came out of drydock. It is a good effort to upgrade to a more recent technology but the roll out has had many problems and was over hyped. Having worked in IT I have seen this played out so many times before when sales/management pushes the techies to the back of the bus and refuses to listen to their concerns. It always ends up a marketing disaster.

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Princess is definitely having technical problems with the network infrastructure. They are using a different satellite service for the internet connection that may not be all that robust. It sounds like while not implemented on any other ship, they are working on the infrastructure on certain other ships who recently came out of drydock. It is a good effort to upgrade to a more recent technology but the roll out has had many problems and was over hyped. Having worked in IT I have seen this played out so many times before when sales/management pushes the techies to the back of the bus and refuses to listen to their concerns. It always ends up a marketing disaster.

 

It sure happened this time

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Status as was told to a stock analyst recently:

 

Debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2017, the OCEAN medallion offers a step-up in guest experience. The size of a quarter, it allows for keyless entry and for a guest to leave the ship and get back on, allows a guest to track and message other members of their party, gives GPS directions to any point on the ship, the capability to check out ports before you get there, to buy things without having a wallet handy and have it delivered to any spot on the ship, and not only that, learns your preferences and tailors recommendations based on them, offering every passenger a virtual concierge. As of now, it is only on the Regal Princess and is in tweaking mode before a full rollout to ostensibly all of its cruise lines.

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It may be in "tweaking mode" but it seems more like "twerking mode". I was sooooooooooooo looking forward to this technology and they said it had been exhaustively tested. I think it had actually been through rigorous testing but not in real world conditions. This is where marketing people don't get it. Just because it looks good on their end of things doesn't mean it will actually work. Implementation is where the actual work comes into play and when you are handed a bunch of marketing hype without any actual technical input in the process it never works out. It's hard to understand how they missed the basic difference between a building on land and a ship at sea. Ships are metal. Everywhere. Shouldn't they (duh... of course they should have) have thought of this and done their land testing accordingly? Did nobody ever think of this or... did someone try to point it out and was ignored? (Been there, done that. I worked for a state agency for the state of California.

 

Q: Why would we get rid of our fiber optic link and go to the expense of replacing it with two T1 lines? Don't we already have the capability of around 28 or so T1 lines with our existing fiber?

 

A: Because your other offices don't have fiber and we want it all to be the same.

 

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh........ California. My taxes at "work".

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Hm. My husband mentioned ***** since we booked the Sky and since we haven’t had any cruises booked in awhile I hadn’t been paying attention to what was going on. Sounds like if it hasn’t rolled out by then though we aren’t missing much yet.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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I recently had a conversation with a few people from Princess who definitely would be in the know. They said that ***** would continue its roll out this year. That they were a bit aggressive with the initial plan, but that they are expanding it. They just want to make it right.

 

Sent from my SM-N950U using Forums mobile app

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Status as was told to a stock analyst recently:

 

Debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2017, the OCEAN medallion offers a step-up in guest experience. The size of a quarter, it allows for keyless entry and for a guest to leave the ship and get back on, allows a guest to track and message other members of their party, gives GPS directions to any point on the ship, the capability to check out ports before you get there, to buy things without having a wallet handy and have it delivered to any spot on the ship, and not only that, learns your preferences and tailors recommendations based on them, offering every passenger a virtual concierge. As of now, it is only on the Regal Princess and is in tweaking mode before a full rollout to ostensibly all of its cruise lines.

 

Sounds like someone speaking with forked tongue as they used to say

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Princess is definitely having technical problems with the network infrastructure. They are using a different satellite service for the internet connection that may not be all that robust. It sounds like while not implemented on any other ship, they are working on the infrastructure on certain other ships who recently came out of drydock. It is a good effort to upgrade to a more recent technology but the roll out has had many problems and was over hyped. Having worked in IT I have seen this played out so many times before when sales/management pushes the techies to the back of the bus and refuses to listen to their concerns. It always ends up a marketing disaster.

This is being integrated in one of the most hostile environments for any type of WiFi system, a steel can. I imagine speed concerns were looked at and possibly dismissed as to data base access. If you look at all the ways this can be implemented (and there are several), it is possible they chose unwisely. Delays can be killers when you need to respond to potentially 1000s of hits processed every minute as people enter their rooms, may purchases or buy drinks, enter elevators, etc.

There was a post a while back where someone went through one of the princess ships mapping out WiFi signal strength. (Might be what another CC poster was indicating when the techie was caring the laptop around.) It was amazing to see the drop off after only moving a few cabins down. This directly effects how the Medallion is read and responded to. I'll bet testing was done in a better environment than a steel can.

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We thought we were lucky to have it on the Regal Princess. We were the unlucky ones who had it. They need to scrap the product.

 

Why unlucky? We had it and it worked to get in the room and make purchases. Most of the rest didn't work for squat but it certainly wasn't detrimental to the cruise. At least it wasn't to us.

 

Tom

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They will eventually get it right, but it will cost 10x as much as originally projected and take 2x as long.

 

Remember when they first rolled out internet cafes? Even hardwired to on-board servers, the PCs were a pain to use, log on to and especially log out on those rough sea days!

 

Remember when they first rolled out wifi in the atrium - the line at the internet desk with people trying to connect their IPADS and Apples? (Some of those people are still there today!)

 

Remember when they first rolled out wifi in cabins? They still have cabins with wifi dead spots at the desk, but the bed's ok!. The steel in the ships will basically wreak havoc with any RF signal. (I've had the same problem in hotels as well.)

 

In the old days you used to have to test new software/hardware systems under realistic conditions. That is apparently what they are doing now - test/fix/test/fix/test/fix...been there, done that...now chuckling under my breath.

 

My biggest complaint with IT folks nowadays, especially in my own company, is that they don't test new software before they blindly deploy to determine all of the unintended consequences (like locking out every multi-function printer in the division hooked up via USB), and most IT folks are sitting with a Gig-E line to the server in the room next door and wondering why I'm having a problem updating my computer over a 356kB/sec VPN connection from two states away! Or on a ship in the middle of the Tasman sea!

 

Its gotten to the point nowadays that I have my own test computer for my home network. All of those updates, all of that new cute software is deployed on my junk computer first before I put it on my main computers. I have had to restore that one from scratch a couple of times now due to Windows update issues and software that didn't do what I wanted it to do...

 

Us old dogs still know a few tricks...

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They will eventually get it right, but it will cost 10x as much as originally projected and take 2x as long.

 

Remember when they first rolled out internet cafes? Even hardwired to on-board servers, the PCs were a pain to use, log on to and especially log out on those rough sea days!

 

Remember when they first rolled out wifi in the atrium - the line at the internet desk with people trying to connect their IPADS and Apples? (Some of those people are still there today!)

 

Remember when they first rolled out wifi in cabins? They still have cabins with wifi dead spots at the desk, but the bed's ok!. The steel in the ships will basically wreak havoc with any RF signal. (I've had the same problem in hotels as well.)

 

In the old days you used to have to test new software/hardware systems under realistic conditions. That is apparently what they are doing now - test/fix/test/fix/test/fix...been there, done that...now chuckling under my breath.

 

My biggest complaint with IT folks nowadays, especially in my own company, is that they don't test new software before they blindly deploy to determine all of the unintended consequences (like locking out every multi-function printer in the division hooked up via USB), and most IT folks are sitting with a Gig-E line to the server in the room next door and wondering why I'm having a problem updating my computer over a 356kB/sec VPN connection from two states away! Or on a ship in the middle of the Tasman sea!

 

Its gotten to the point nowadays that I have my own test computer for my home network. All of those updates, all of that new cute software is deployed on my junk computer first before I put it on my main computers. I have had to restore that one from scratch a couple of times now due to Windows update issues and software that didn't do what I wanted it to do...

 

Us old dogs still know a few tricks...

 

Been there, done that and have the tshirt to prove it. We know that Princess will get it done if they get the right folks in to put out the fire and fix the application.

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Its gotten to the point nowadays that I have my own test computer for my home network. All of those updates, all of that new cute software is deployed on my junk computer first before I put it on my main computers. I have had to restore that one from scratch a couple of times now due to Windows update issues and software that didn't do what I wanted it to do...

instead of an old computer, use a virtual machine. a free software is virtualbox. A virtual machine is much much easier to toy around instead of having a separate physical computer.

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