Wifi on Infinity

[timetravellers]

When we were on Infinity for a trip round South America, the wifi connection was impossibly slow.

 

Is the wifi connection always that bad on this ship or was it the area we sailed to?

 

We shall be sailing through the Panama Canal soon and I shall need to email my very elderly father daily. Don't need the internet for anything else.

 

Would it be quicker if I use the ship's Internet Lounge?

 

Thanks in anticipation of advice.

[grayjay]

This year we cruised on "Infinity" on one of the South America trips and around the British Isles. Both times it was S L O W or even down at times - not much difference between the cruises. It was better in ports - but there was also the chance of free wi-fi at the port itself outside the ship or at an internet café nearby.

We stopped using the internet in our cabin and went to the internet lounge with our laptop or sometimes used the computers in the lounge to write a short message.

[timetravellers]

This year we cruised on "Infinity" on one of the South America trips and around the British Isles. Both times it was S L O W or even down at times - not much difference between the cruises. It was better in ports - but there was also the chance of free wi-fi at the port itself outside the ship or at an internet café nearby.

We stopped using the internet in our cabin and went to the internet lounge with our laptop or sometimes used the computers in the lounge to write a short message.

Thanks for your reply. I am sure just getting the iPad to connect to wifi used up half of the minutes.

Maybe I shall try the internet lounge and warn my father that he will only get a message every couple of days. After all, there not much to say when you have been on a sea day all day.;)

[cruisestitch]

In South America, and the farthest north reaches of the British Isles region, it is difficult to maintain contact with the satellites which are high above the equatorial regions. Same is true when sailing in and out of the fjords of Norway, where the terrain blocks the signal.

 

When you asked if it would be quicker to use the Internet Lounge, probably not.

 

The best way to deal with the slow connection problems is to try during non-peak times -- for instance, during dinner, early morning, or late at night.

 

Be efficient when doing e-mail -- compose your letter while you are off line, then connect and send and download new incoming mail, and immediately log off.

 

Composing new e-mail while you are sitting at a monitor is always going to eat up the minutes, so using the ship's computers is probably going to be the most inefficient way of communicating.

 

Be sure that you know your home e-mail system's method for connecting while away -- will you use WebMail, or some other mail portal? Be sure to bring your password -- many cruisers don't and aren't able to connect from afar. Practice using your mobile device at places like Starbucks or McDonalds so you know how do access your mail when not at your home computer.

 

And unsubscribe to as many things as you can before you cruise. While it isn't a big deal to get daily ads from Barnes & Noble, Delta airlines, the Gap or whoever you get mail from, while at sea that just clogs up your e-mail and takes time to download, time you are paying for. So unsubscribe to as many things as you can.

 

Tell your friends and family not to forward jokes, send photos or other large files while you are away. They also take a long time to download, and ask them to please delay all these kinds of messages until you return.

 

If you are efficient, you can do a lot in a few minutes of wi-fi time.

[MEcruzr]

Connections on a cruise ship are all slow. It's the nature of the beast. Frustrating, but it's normal.

 

Excellent suggestions, Cruisestitch!

[WestLakeGirl]

Another suggestion: get an email address you only use on trips, like a gmail account. Give it to friend and family but never to commercial entities like stores and restaurants. It won't collect lots of unwanted messages and will be faster to use than your home email account because it won't be back logged with lots of potential spam, presumably

[timetravellers]

Several good bits of advice there. Thank you. I was thinking of getting a 'fresh' email address solely for use by my family.

 

I think it may be quicker to connect to a webmail service. I shall have to experiment before we go and also, of course, prepare the email before we go and copy and paste once connected.

[WestLakeGirl]

On my tablet, I log on, quickly download new email and log off. This usually takes only one or two minutes. One by one I then read the emails and answer them. Being off line, when I send them they sit in my outbox. Then when I go back onto the wifi they are sent, and new ones come in. Again this only takes a minute or two. Sign off without reading the new ones and start again. I can stretch my 90 free minutes to last for a two week cruise this way, augmenting with free wifi occasionally in ports. I never send photographs unless I'm on free wifi. Yes the wifi connection is slow but our 180 minutes are so far adequate. We used to save some minutes back for printing boarding passes but now that we can check in and have our boarding passes sent to our phones we don't even do that any more