Creating a hotspot on my phone and Sprint on Breakaway

[js]

Hi. I am one of those on here that have no clue how this would work lol but just wanted to chime in and say so great for you that you were able to get your dd to go. My dd is in law school and never says no to a vacation but its getting harder and harder for her to go unless its summer. I cherish each trip with her. Enjoy!! What did you end up telling the school?

 

 

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[hugocruiser]

As said, if there are no "towers", then there's no reception. Pretty sure when they say "global", they mean on land that has towers!

 

While you are accurate that there is not a cell tower on the ship there is reception via a satalite system called CellAtSea.....

 

From NCL's website:

Cellular Phone Service & Texting at Sea

Freestyle Cellular Service

Norwegian Cruise Line guests can make and receive calls, send and receive text messages, read emails and surf the web on their own cell phones and mobile devices just as they do on land when the ship is at sea, thanks to the CellAtSea® service. Just check with your cellular phone carrier that your cell phone will be able to roam internationally. Keeping in touch with your friends and family, while at sea, has never been easier.

 

I don't know if sprint supports data on board thought. After looking at the sprint website I can see where it would be confusing as they are pushing their 2g world travel plan and then telling you what the costs for service would be onboard.

 

I would suggest you contact sprint and verify if data is available. I can confirm that your cell phone will work for voice and text.

[drvalo]

I am recently off the Jade. I used Sprint Open World (free unlimited voice, unlimited text and some data) in most all of the Caribbean ports with no problem, although it sometimes took a while for the phone and data to connect (auto searching). When the ship was at sea, I turned off the data and usually the phone entirely. Your international roaming plan may be different as I know they have a couple.

 

While the phone will work on the ship, the price is just not worth it unless there is an emergency and it is not included in the Open World plan. I know the Sprint site is very confusing and most of the reps don't really know much about how anything works. They know how to sell you things. Yes, the phone works on the ship. No, I would not pay the usage fees for using it on the ship unless cost is not of importance to you.

 

I would buy the ship Wifi package if you really need internet access on the ship. You will likely come out much cheaper.

[BirdTravels]

You won't be close to towers in the middle of the ocean - no reception, no internet, no wifi hotspot.

 

 

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These people are 100% wrong

 

As soon as you are away from land, the ship turns on its "cell tower" and you have cellular service (voice, data, text). You are charged by your cellular service (not the ship) based on their international rates. If your carrier offers a cruise ship package, you will pay that rate. Most standard global roaming packages do not include cruise ships. They would be charged separately.

[BirdTravels]

at sea the only thing you will connect to is the ships internet and be charged as such, at port it is different but make sure you are hooked to non ship internet while in port

 

This is 100% wrong.

 

Once you are out of range of land based cellular service, the ship turns on its tower. You get voice, rext, and data service. You can also buy the ships wifi service.

[lmm1967]

OP specifically stated he wanted to use Sprints international plan to create a hot spot on the ship.

 

Connecting to the ships cell tower, which has service provided by a third party, is not the same as connecting to land towers that provide Sprints international service. The third party service provider bills your cell provider and they in turn charge you.

 

I'm not here to argue - I simply tried to provide an answer and obviously didn't use enough words.

 

OP - connect to whatever service your phone can find, fire up your hot spot function and have at it. You'll get your answer - good or bad - on your follow up cell phone bill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[BirdTravels]

UGH!

So I CAN create a hotspot on my phone using my phones cellular data provided by Sprints global roaming and my daughter can tap her iPad into it? You've done this?

 

 

 

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My quick scan of Sprint says "yes". The breakaway is not covered by your plan. You pay $20 per MB for data, &2.99 per minute to call, $.50 per text message sent.

 

A GB is 1000 MB. You do the math.

[BirdTravels]

OP specifically stated he wanted to use Sprints international plan to create a hot spot on the ship.

 

Connecting to the ships cell tower, which has service provided by a third party, is not the same as connecting to land towers that provide Sprints international service. The third party service provider bills your cell provider and they in turn charge you.

 

I'm not here to argue - I simply tried to provide an answer and obviously didn't use enough words.

 

OP - connect to whatever service your phone can find, fire up your hot spot function and have at it. You'll get your answer - good or bad - on your follow up cell phone bill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Terrible advice. It will result in thousands or tens of thousands of dollar a in charges.

 

People who don't take the time to understand the implications of that they are saying should not offer "advice".

[PippenBooBoo]

Many have given you answers based on first-hand knowledge.

 

 

 

I wouldnt expect more when you dismiss answers when they arent the ones you like (or comprehend).

 

 

Opinons aren't answers and conjuncture is never helpful.

You're right many have given good information but many have given misinformation in the spirit of right fighting which I'm not interested in engaging in.

Have a great night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[luvtheships]

Terrible advice. It will result in thousands or tens of thousands of dollar a in charges.

 

People who don't take the time to understand the implications of that they are saying should not offer "advice".

 

 

Lol he knows it's terrible advice

 

He's trying to point out that what the op wants to do is financially ridiculous. Lol

 

 

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[luvtheships]

Opinons aren't answers and conjuncture is never helpful.

You're right many have given good information but many have given misinformation in the spirit of right fighting which I'm not interested in engaging in.

Have a great night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Just use the ships wifi and buy a plan that fits your needs or take it as a freebie if possible

 

Forget about using the data on your phone while on the ship unless you absolutely do not care if your next bill is $ 1000s more than you normally pay

 

When in port use wifi

 

This has been stated already and is good advice

 

 

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[SuiteRose]

Bottom line.. turn OFF DATA as soon as you leave the port... when at sea use airplane mode.. or your phone will incur hundreds of dollars in data fees.. (I know from personal experience when my husband left his phone on and in a drawer so missed Verizon's texts telling him about the charges)... I'm not sure using your phone as a hot spot would actually work at all and if it did your data bill may be as high as your cruise fare.. and this is personal experience, not guessing... I get the unlimited internet plan for $29.99 per day.. trust me, it's a bargain compared to what your roaming fees will be if you don't put your phone on airplane mode or turn of ALL data...

[pieshops]

This is 100% wrong.

 

Once you are out of range of land based cellular service, the ship turns on its tower. You get voice, rext, and data service. You can also buy the ships wifi service.

 

isn't that exactly what I said

[mking8288]

Just spilled my morning coffee viewing #alternative facts - great job by many arm-chair experts, BIGLY. Let me join for a little fun.

 

First, not knowing what devices OP is using for her/his hotspot - I assumed it's worked on land, allowed by Sprint, incurred no extra charges, not blocked while roaming international, and, has a global travel data plan that works on high sea ... so far, so good.

 

Second, WiFi or wireless signal will - as a given, cut whatever speed by 50% as it transmit & receive using 50% of the existing bandwidth. Thus, 2G speed will become 1G/Edge speed. 3G speed is commonly twice as fast as 2G speed at 256k (and, old fashion DSL over cooper wiring is 1MB or better and usable, like your typical "free" hotel internet connection ... some are better & many/most are worst; and, it is SHARED - like ship's satellite-based WiFi internet) Breakaway and other NCL ships also use a closed loop WiFi inTRAnet , relatively fast & usable but it is "inside" the bubble and firewalled, no access to/from the inTERnet.

 

Bring OP back to usage on high seas - 2G speed is 128k and that's turbo 56k (analog) modem from the late 1980's and early 1990's over dial-up telephone lines ... remember those "acoustic" coupler and the brick Motorola MicroTac flip phone - that's the kind of speed you are promised. It's okay for reading basic text-based email and simple browing on a mobile browser. Even when I went from a Sony quadband GSM slider phone, 10+ years ago to a Motorola Q smartphone with the QWERTY keybaord - Edge/2G and 2.5G data speed was exciting, because it was faster than 56K and analog ... AOL and Yahoo days when most never heard of Google then. Sprint data services are awong the worst and rated by some as worst than T-Mobile & AT&T WS - part of the problem is their choice of CDMA technology & locked radio bands on their approved devices, not compatible with many radio systems and data network deployed by partner or roaming carriers ... users with iPhones tend to do a little better, especially theirs are carrier-unlocked and can roam with a different Sim card and APN settings loaded.

 

The way to visualize this setup on what OP is thinking - consider your access to an old DSL connection 5 to 10 years ago with a hotspot that reduce your slow speed by 50% automatically with X number of users already signed in - then, share that access and further speed reductions to/from another device or hardware nearby.

 

Will it work - yes, it depends. Voice calling is probably fine, SMS or texting should work as it doesn't need bandwidth, as long as you avoid any video or data-intensive uploads & downloads and web-serving (like FaceTime ... require wider bandwidth, more speed & low latency).

 

For the BA, depending on what & how you plan to use the WiFi inTERnet for (forget about streaming, they are either blocked or virtually unsable - and possibly discovered to your disappointment & horror, as unworkable simple from ultra-high latency, timing-out and low speed) - you can purchase the 300 MB or 1GB data plan for use on the ship, instead of the unlimited plan, to save some money, as you can only log-in and use it one device at a time and hotspot is not supported/allowed. You are on a shared node among the 4,000+ passengers on the same sailing so network traffic bottleneck is a given, depending on time of day - MiFi/WiFi router with 5GHz band enabled will do somewhat better.

 

You will find some of our detailed, documented experience using the ship's networks on the BA last year & the year before, for how well things worked or did not - refer to links under our Signature here. There is also a new APP to be downloaded as a extra add-on when using NCL's satellite for better data compression & cache - install this free "SpeedNet" by EMC Connected for faster satellite broadband web browsing.

[ajaris]

My quick scan of Sprint says "yes". The breakaway is not covered by your plan. You pay $20 per MB for data, &2.99 per minute to call, $.50 per text message sent.

 

A GB is 1000 MB. You do the math.

He is right... I also have Sprint and use it when I travel to other countries and never had a problem roaming... but in The breakaway is different...I am just going to use my phone while I am in Bermuda.

While on the ship people can use Iconcierge app to communicate with others on the ship.

[philip_eunice1]

I think you should give it a go

Connect via the at sea connection turn off your wifi

And come back and start a new thread on how much you were charged

 

 

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[dexddd]

I think you should give it a go

Connect via the at sea connection turn off your wifi

And come back and start a new thread on how much you were charged

 

 

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At least under the old Verizon plan they had various packages for cell at sea and the $80 plan gave you 250 talk minutes, 250 texts, and quite a bit of data gb. So with that you'd be capped if you stayed under the limits. The new verizon plan is ala carte so it ran probably about 3 times as much for 1/3 of what we got under the old fixed price plan.

[philip_eunice1]

At least under the old Verizon plan they had various packages for cell at sea and the $80 plan gave you 250 talk minutes, 250 texts, and quite a bit of data gb. So with that you'd be capped if you stayed under the limits. The new verizon plan is ala carte so it ran probably about 3 times as much for 1/3 of what we got under the old fixed price plan.

 

 

 

Back in I think 2009 I used my phone for calls at sea needed to be in touch due to personnel reasons I knew what I was getting into before I started I think it cost around $500 but fortunately was expecting it

 

 

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[Vyhanek]

If I was taking my daughter that needed to do school work, we would find free wifi in each port. This is pretty easy to do. The ships crew can tell you where to find the free wifi.

 

The reason i say this is because even if you buy the most expensive ship package, which we did, it is still very slow and you can't download or upload a document or anything too fancy. I think if you tried to download an excel spreadsheet, you'd crash the whole system! On the ship you will be able to check email, find websites...slowly but not download documents or anything fancy.

 

 

So if my teen was coming with me, we would take the first part of each port day, find free wifi with her laptop and do whatever she needed on land with fast wifi. Then she'd have that on her laptop to take back to the ship and work offline. Then the next port, she'd send in what she worked on from the last port.

 

 

We'd be using the ships wifi just for sending and receiving email, checking teacher websites to get assignments, etc. That's the type of thing you can do. at sea.

[TardisDance]

You can only get it on certain countries that are covered. You really don't want to keep you cellular data on while on the ship. The Breakaway has it's own cell tower for Sprint, and it's turned on while the ship moves. We were barely out of port in the Southern Caribbean, and my DH figured he had a couple extra minutes to backup pictures to our cloud service. Wrong! The next day in St. Kitts, I received a bunch of data warning emails. It turned out to be $100 in charges for around 7 MB of data since we weren't on the Breakaway plan! Thankfully, Sprint waived it when I told them we didn't know about the tower.

[BirdTravels]

If I was taking my daughter that needed to do school work, we would find free wifi in each port. This is pretty easy to do. The ships crew can tell you where to find the free wifi.

 

The reason i say this is because even if you buy the most expensive ship package, which we did, it is still very slow and you can't download or upload a document or anything too fancy. I think if you tried to download an excel spreadsheet, you'd crash the whole system! On the ship you will be able to check email, find websites...slowly but not download documents or anything fancy.

 

 

So if my teen was coming with me, we would take the first part of each port day, find free wifi with her laptop and do whatever she needed on land with fast wifi. Then she'd have that on her laptop to take back to the ship and work offline. Then the next port, she'd send in what she worked on from the last port.

 

 

We'd be using the ships wifi just for sending and receiving email, checking teacher websites to get assignments, etc. That's the type of thing you can do. at sea.

 

Since the upgrades of wifi over the summer, service is ok. Satellite internet. We buy an unlimited package on every cruise. We cruise 6 times a year.