Internet packages - sale?

[Tura Lura]

Does NCL ever have sales or promotions on their internet packages?  Royal’s can vary by $5-$10/day with sales. Does NCL ever do that?  The packages are pricey!

 

also is there a speed/bandwidth difference between the unlimited packages. ( not social media, just regular and premium)?  Or just allowing streaming, rather than pushing up the speed to enable streaming? 

[Rsavtechcruise]

No 

only sale is if you buy more than 2 days before sailing you get a 10% savings but that’s it

[tallnthensome]

No, always a rip-off .

[Tura Lura]

Ok so I guess I have to pay.  So regular or premium/streaming.  Is there a difference in speed?  Or just same speed but with streaming? (Buffered?).

 

can you do WiFi calling with both? 

[Rsavtechcruise]

No 

only sale is if you buy more than 2 days before sailing you get a 10% savings but that’s it

[Rsavtechcruise]

Speed Is the same only difference is one lets streaming like Netflix Hulu through other doesn’t 

 

yes can do calling with both

[Falckon]

One of the Free at Sea promotions is a 250 minute free internet package, which is a pretty good deal. If you want to upgrade to Unlimited or Streaming on board, you get a $125 credit for having the 250 minute package. I've used the Unlimited package many times with pretty good results, but I've never tried the Streaming package.

[BirdTravels]

2 hours ago, Tura Lura said:

Ok so I guess I have to pay.  So regular or premium/streaming.  Is there a difference in speed?  Or just same speed but with streaming? (Buffered?).

 

can you do WiFi calling with both? 

No. You need the premium to do wifi calling. 

 

The "speed" is the same for both the regular and premium package. The only difference is that they open more ports to allow streaming services and VPN with the premium.

 

And, no sales. Unlike Royal who hits you with a spam email advertisement every 16 hours from the day you book to the day you sell, NCL does not offer "sales". 

Edited October 21, 2019 by BirdTravels

[Tura Lura]

4 hours ago, BirdTravels said:

No. You need the premium to do wifi calling. 

 

The "speed" is the same for both the regular and premium package. The only difference is that they open more ports to allow streaming services and VPN with the premium.

 

And, no sales. Unlike Royal who hits you with a spam email advertisement every 16 hours from the day you book to the day you sell, NCL does not offer "sales". 

Too bad. Those sales from Royal makes Voom WiFi about half the price of NCL 

[don't-use-real-name]

LINK:

 

https://www.ncl.com/onboard-packages/internet-packages

[Tura Lura]

2 minutes ago, don't-use-real-name said:

LINK:

 

https://www.ncl.com/onboard-packages/internet-packages

Thanks. Yes I know where to purchase, was hoping they had sales or promotions where the price was less. 🙂

[mking8288]

Difference between premium streaming, non-streaming and minutes/MB plans are not in speed, rather/instead - in which TCP/UDP ports are open/unblocked or closed behind/at the server firewall - dynamically balanced & cached.  Congestion & sluggish latency is a reflection of heavy loads (nodes at/near bandwidth capacity ... as it is shared - ship navigation, safety & operations will always take/be given satellite "traffic" priority).   I would not be surprised that their Cisco hardware are tracking devices based on its "Mac" addresses.  

 

To take full advantage of speed & lesser degree of congestion, your hardware (tablet, iPhone/iPad, smartphone, laptop, etc.) should be 802.11 ac compliant & set/configure to prefer/use 5 Ghz band, not 2.4 Ghz.  

 

Compared to Voom (Royal) and Princess (Carnival) - NCL's overall pipeline upstream is limited, the other "folks" deploying different/newer satellites at lower orbits above, with obvious advantages with everyone at sea.  

 

No "sales" ever for NCL's internet that we know of - used their slow internet since 2003, when it was truly 3G & sluggish then ... improved, but.  If OP wishes to save, consider buying/paying for the package on Day 2 (for a typical 7 days cruise) as you will then be charged for 6 days worth of the unlimited package.   Many find that they are pre-occupied and busy on embarkation afternoon/evening to not need constant/regular/frequent "connect" time to keep up with email, news & social media, etc.   

 

With discipline, we metered our "on" air time to 1 to 2 hours at most while at sea and with decent & inexpensive global roaming coverage at 200+ countries worldwide, seldom find the need to use satellite at sea, except for "urgent" matters or use.  Thus, even for a 15 nights cruise on NCL earlier this year, including 5 or 6 port days - we managed fine with under 400 minutes & used about 2 GB worth of data (would be a lot less if weren't for posting "Semi-Live" with compressed pix uploaded.)  As always, these results & user experience are YMMV.  Individual ships in the fleet are known to be better, equal while others are often scored as worst than average by most regulars here on the board.  

[Tura Lura]

Thanks for the details.  I’ll be using an iPhone XR and new iPad Pro so the hardware will be ok.  I’ll just suck it up and get the streaming version for $20 more.  I work in Digital tech and I have zero interest in being disconnected. 

Edited October 22, 2019 by Tura Lura