Celebrity Wi-Fi - Summitt

[Queen of Oakville]

Just got off 11-night Summit. I was hoping to get a wifi deal before going on and couldn't find one. It was a port-intensive US/Canada route, so I decided initially to just go with my cell phone while in port, but of course before the first sea day, something came up and I needed to be accessible to work, so I splurged on the 2-device package.

 

When we sailed Reflection, the wifi was so bad, I could not even login to webmail as the servers would time out - I cancelled the package after two days. On our last Oasis cruise, the wifi was reasonably priced and phenomenal and we were streaming Netflix and had no issues whatsoever. I figured the new Royal Voom internet-at-sea was repackaged as Excelerate for X, but it's not even in the same league.

 

Although they advertise it as a surf and stream package it's not. Logging in/out was difficult sometimes as the login screen would just hang. Sometimes it took forever just to get an email preview. Netflix took forever to load, forget trying to actually trying to download a movie. My daughter spent the last day at sea trying to download a movie for the flight home. It took almost 6 hours to download the emoji movie from Netflix.

 

I paid $40 a day for 2-devices. On Royal (if memory serves) it was $18/day for 3 devices. So more than twice the price for a far inferior product.

 

If you need to be accessible to work (like I did) it got the job done, although at times very slowly. I had to always make sure that emails had actually left my phone and not stuck in my outbox. There were times when there were glimmers of hope and the speed picked up and I could actually see previews on my Instagram feed, other times all I would see was gray boxes.

 

Did two speed tests during the slow times, one was 1.12Mbps down and 0.14Mbps up. The second time was 0.25Mbps down and .004Mbps up. In my opinion, Celebrity has to consistently offer better than this to charge what they are charging.

[pl281]

I was on this cruise as well... I had the internet as a perk with my room so I can't comment as to the pricing... but regarding the speed I will say when we first got on board around 1pm I was getting about 4MB on the down - as the cruise went on I was getting anywhere from 0.5 to 1.5MB which for streaming doesn't work... I was able to do email and most of my website edits I needed to do.

 

A couple things I noticed

1) My devices would drop the wifi from time to time

2) We did have some weather a couple of days and I felt it impacted the performance

3) I felt it was faster than what I've seen on the ships while in Europe

4) One thing that would be nice is if they showed in the iLounge est. bandwidth per package / show a graph of some of the overall usage stats

This way it at least sets the expectation - is this going to be dog slow or blazing fast

[Queen of Oakville]

Sounds like our experience was similar. I found that the further away we were at sea, the better the wifi, and it seemed to get worse when we were in port. It also seemed that if two us were on at the same, we didn't necessarily have the same surfing experience, one might have a normal speed while other would be slower. it almost seemed like some connections were faster and others were slower, and logging on/off again could greatly improve your connection speed.

 

 

I did ask, and there were no connection speed options (Royal offers 3 options for surfing, streaming and gaming). I went to the ilounge on the first day to ask about upgrading the package, and it was basically package/no package. The only variable was how many devices you wanted to connect at one time.

[A Sixth?]

We were on the Reflection this past January after their techno dry dock that included a much improved wifi. I was impressed all things considerd

[keep on cruisin]

We have been on Summit twice and i had no trouble with basic email, text messaging and for the most part video messaging with Facebook messenger. We could not stream video consistently with Plex, slingbox or netflix. At times they would be ok, but for the most part not very good.

 

But that has been our experience on our most recent NCL Breakaway as well. We had wifi on 2 out of 3 sailings. On one of those we had great service. I was able to log into mlb.tv or the slingbox and watch Mets games. Then by last November they had completely locked out all video streaming. They stated a new plan was being brought out to allow it. Have not been on to see if that has occured.

 

As for the Summit, hopefully the improved wifi will be part of the upcoming dry dock plans.

[ARI421]

My 14 year old just bought this for our cruise 7/22 I thought it was ridiculous priced considering it barely works!! Do they do anything if you complain?!he is convinced he can watch Netflix before bed that's why he got it, he claims it's advertized that way!

 

Sent from my Moto G (5S) Plus using Forums mobile app

[TXU2]

One should not forget they are on a moving ship with a connection to satellites. The specific cruise on the Summit had an unusual amount of fog which affects satellite communication. Further, the position of satellite is generally less favorable as one goes further north which was the situation in question. While internet is not great, it has been a lot worse in the past. Even on land, cellular service can be poor when lots of folks in the same location are trying to access the internet at the same time. So expectations should reflect the realities of the situation.

[Queen of Oakville]

My 14 year old just bought this for our cruise 7/22 I thought it was ridiculous priced considering it barely works!! Do they do anything if you complain?!he is convinced he can watch Netflix before bed that's why he got it, he claims it's advertized that way!

 

Sent from my Moto G (5S) Plus using Forums mobile app

 

Yes, it is advertised that way. They actually include the Netflix icon on their promotion stream.

 

As stated above, the wifi is sketchy at best and not consistent. If he waits (5 maybe 10 minutes) he can get the movie to load enough that he can watch it. But if you try to fast-forward etc. it will buffer all over again. My kids did this a few times, but DH never had the patience. The better solution for him (if he only wants Netflix) is to download moves in advance to his tablet and then he can watch whatever he wants without wifi connection.

 

And if you complain, they will offer you your money back (at least if you complain in the first few days). If you wait until the end of the cruise, I doubt they will do anything. i complained the first day, even ran a speedtest in front of the i lounge guy. His response was that he would refund me the package.

[Queen of Oakville]

One should not forget they are on a moving ship with a connection to satellites. The specific cruise on the Summit had an unusual amount of fog which affects satellite communication. Further, the position of satellite is generally less favorable as one goes further north which was the situation in question. While internet is not great, it has been a lot worse in the past. Even on land, cellular service can be poor when lots of folks in the same location are trying to access the internet at the same time. So expectations should reflect the realities of the situation.

 

i did not realize fog played a role, although I sometimes found the wifi to be better when further out to sea, and worse when closer to land. I'm not a tech-savvy person, but if I had to guess they have a certain allotment of high-speed connections and it is random whether you get one. My observation was that two people connected at the same time could have completely different experiences. I should have done a speedtest when that was happening.

 

 

As far as I'm aware, X has the "new" wifi program which was recently rolled out to Summit. The new program is called Excellerate (or something like that).

[Finabear]

I think this is about expectations. If you expect the internet to be like home you will be very disappointed.

As TXU2said - internet out at sea is a completely different situation. Add to that the increasing numbers of people who are surfing the net, using wifi calling and trying to download large amounts of data(movies etc)... there will be issues. We expect it to be slow and perhaps intermittent at times. The fact that we can have internet/texting and now wifi calling makes it possible for us to cruise. You will never hear us complain.