Unlimited Internet

[HabsFan23]

I'll be sailing on the Getaway in 10 days (but whose counting!:)) and I plan on buying the unlimited Internet package. Can anyone let me know how it worked: do you have to log on everytime? Does it stay connected? How's the speed? Any dead spots on the boat?

 

Thanks!

[cardbucfan]

We bought it on our 8/8 sailing and used it among four people. DS20 had the best connection on a galaxy phone. Our iPads and iPhones would take forever to "hook up" and some times we never could get a connection. We could only have one device at a time on it and it was pretty slow. No real dead zones but I seemed to get better service in the garden cafe and better speed early in the morning before everybody else signed on. Mid-day on a sea day? Forget it!

[Heronymous]

I had the unlimited plan on the Getaway 8/22 - 8/30 cruise last week. It was mostly useless. Even though you stay connected to the wifi network NCL_Ship_Getaway, you are disconnected from the Internet once you are idle from web browsing for a certain number of minutes which never seemed consistent to me. sometimes it was 10 minutes, sometimes 45... Your internet enabled apps or web browsing would stop working until you opened a browser and retried your first name, last name, room number, and password. Even then browsing only worked half the time. Half the time the login page wouldn't even appear... IConcierge rarely worked as well (different than Internet access)... I wouldn't have paid for it knowing how horrible it would be.. I demanded a partial credit for it... Ahmet the Internet manager is a straight up liar and lied to people in line who complained about the internet not working saying it was fine and it was their devices. I'm a network engineer for a living and I challenged him to prove me wrong because I could prove everything he said as inaccurate.. He couldn't so he gave me a partial credit but then disconnected my internet for the rest of the cruise... He was rude, arrogant, and has no business dealing with people. Be forewarned....

[liwels]

Cruised Getaway 8/22-8/29 and found service to be spotty and extremely slow..... Unless you have to have it for work related matters I would skip it. Usually able to find wifi in ports easily to connect with family/ send pictures.... Etc.

[HabsFan23]

Wow... Man, I think I'll wait and see before purchasing it. Thanks everyone!

[tomk3212]

What everybody seems to forget with shipboard Wi-Fi is it's a satellite (or SATCOM, as we say in military) connection so your bandwidth is pretty limited (it's also tres expensive). Furthermore you're "sharing" this pipe with the television, ship's navigation system, ship's data transmissions, etc. The available bandwidth is divided up between all these shipboard services and take a guess who gets the lowest priority? Yup, pax Internet connectivity. So your Internet connectivity bandwidth is probably equivalent to old-fashioned dial-up.

 

My two cents...

 

Tom

[TonyFred]

What everybody seems to forget with shipboard Wi-Fi is it's a satellite (or SATCOM, as we say in military) connection so your bandwidth is pretty limited (it's also tres expensive). Furthermore you're "sharing" this pipe with the television, ship's navigation system, ship's data transmissions, etc. The available bandwidth is divided up between all these shipboard services and take a guess who gets the lowest priority? Yup, pax Internet connectivity. So your Internet connectivity bandwidth is probably equivalent to old-fashioned dial-up.

 

My two cents...

 

Tom

 

Had the unlimited internet on the Allure of the Seas and got decent speeds and no problem connecting. I could even stream Netflix, etc. There are more passengers on that ship than on the Getaway so the problem resides with NCL and it could be corrected if they wanted to correct it.

[mysticbluebmw]

Had the unlimited internet on the Allure of the Seas and got decent speeds and no problem connecting. I could even stream Netflix, etc. There are more passengers on that ship than on the Getaway so the problem resides with NCL and it could be corrected if they wanted to correct it.

The Oasis and Quantum ships use OB3 satellite coverage and its not a fair comparison to say NCL could fix it if they wanted. OB3 is a recent venture already struggling to meet demand with a total of only 8 low altitude satellites (1/4 the standard altitude of competing satellites) launched in 2013 and 2014. They serve a population that was before unable to acquire broadband internet service, not just cruise ships. Perhaps in the near future, NCL will be able to contract with them for new ship builds.

 

Ship wifi (as slow as it is) has its advantages, and disadvantages, and with a teenage daughter, I'll unfortunately always have to include that in our vacation planning and pricing...ugh :/

[Heronymous]

I'm not forgetting that it's satellite, as I said I work in the industry (including servers and networks) and I have also installed C band, Ku band, DirecPC, Hughsnet, etc... It isn't lost on me how miraculous the service is on a moving ship. I expect poor performance... But this performance was much worse than it should have been for what it is, and their denial of it was my problem. That's why I didn't ask for a full refund like others were, I only asked for a fair adjustment.

Edited September 2, 2015 by Heronymous

[LrgPizza]

Ship wifi (as slow as it is) has its advantages, and disadvantages, and with a teenage daughter, I'll unfortunately always have to include that in our vacation planning and pricing...ugh :/

Or you could tell her no.

[Wavesprite]

Or you could tell her no.

 

Rude response. It's his daughters vacation too, and I'm sure he wants her to be happy while on vacation.....

[mysticbluebmw]

My wife says if I can get get a drink pkg (though, this time it's free :D), my baby girl can have the internet. I learned many years ago, that's one person to whom I can never say no ;)

[swedish weave]

My take on this is regardless of the limitations and other factors, NCL is selling a product and it is not living up to the customers expectations.