Starlink is online on the Discovery Princess

[outtoseacruise]

1 hour ago, Mercruiser said:

I love Alaska cruises. But I think Alaska cruise ports would be especially problematic for you. During the day, the cruisers outnumber the locals by a great deal, especially in Ketchikan, Skagway, and Icy Strait;  less so in Juneau. This causes the cellular internet to slow to a crawl when the ships are in port.  If you do try Alaska , you want to be able to switch between the two dominant carriers: AT&T and GCI (roaming partner for T-Mobile), depending on who's got the better bandwidth in your location. Since you already have T-Mobile, I'd probably take an extra cell phone to use as an AT&T hotspot. You also need a plan that allows you to use Canadian service, while enroute to/from Vancouver or Seattle. AT&T's plans generally include Canada data roaming.

 

Med cruises might work better since a) all EU countries allow seamless roaming,  b) every bit of land is covered with cell towers, c) it all entirely within the Starlink satellite coverage area. (Anything north of 60 degrees in Alaska will have limited Starlink satellite coverage.)

Prior to COVID and Post COVID I add the T-Mobile 15GB International Data Pass to my hotspot and cell ($50 each per month) since it gives me the 15GB of international data on each plus calls and text international on the cell. This trip in Victoria I did have to force both devices a few times and manually select Rogers for the 5G. It's hit or miss in the Bahamas if I have to force it? Sometimes I wonder if BTC has me blacklisted so I have to force it because of my usage there every month?

[outtoseacruise]

Since last September here are some of the better latency and bandwidth test I have seen as well as the horrible one on Independence. The better ones are off of Mariner and Liberty.

Locations have been pretty much the same either Port Canaveral, Port Everglades, CocoCay, or Nassau. 2 ships it's awesome on and 1 it's horrible on? 

Starting to get the idea with what's being seen on Discovery that this could be a ship by ship situation where one is better compared to the others in the fleet. You talk to the glorified Guest Services person that is handling the internet on the ship and this goes way over their head and they can't explain it.

It will be interesting to see how it goes as more Princess ships roll it out. 

[Jeter02]

It goes well above the internet managers head as well. Anytime I've asked him a question they never seem to have an answer. My favorite is when I asked when star link will be coming when they announced it was on its way and he says I have not heard such news of it coming at all 🤦‍♀️

[VibeGuy]

To some extent or another, the streaming companies are sensitive to bandwidth limitations in mobile and satellite networks.  They’ll make some adjustments based on device screen and content types and if they get a bunch of dropped packets or the ping times are long or whatever, they’ll dial it back.  You’ll see this in speedtests even - speedtest and Fast will report different speeds because Fast traffic is using Netflix infrastructure and gets shaped by client-end networks.  
 

if you assume 1mbps streaming (phone/smaller tablet), you should be able to get 1200 streams per cell (I believe the second polarization has been turned on in the latest gen of satellites and the maritime terminals - it was 600ish before).  This assumes ~80% utilization and 20% overhead.  Since everything to the west of the satellite overhead a vessel on the west coast is nearly-empty ocean, you can do some very clever stuff and practically ignore the terminals out there, moving bandwidth from that cell to an adjacent one by using a second frequency.  
 

This, I think, is the primary reason for the large number of antennas in the installation - not only is there a rather low internal bandwidth between the radio and the Ethernet, and you want some redundancy,  but the bandwidth requirements of the ships could easily require several downstream channels and the maritime hardware can only listen on one and talk on one at the same time.   The use of the phased array antennae on the satellites means you can *pour* bandwidth on a glutton like a cruise ship and still deliver a committed amount to other users that happen to be bobbing around 30 miles away.    This specific feature of their spotbeam architecture is a lot more important than I had previously considered - it’s modestly interesting in terrestrial applications but in coastwise applications where the RF is “wasted” on the low subscriber density offshore, but you can redirect it to close-in high-density users like cruise ships, it’s super interesting. 
 

I don’t think a quarter of the ship (pax and crew) streaming simultaneously is going to be extremely common but I don’t think it’s all that toxic given the traffic shaping and the dynamic bandwidth reallocation. 
 

 

[Mercruiser]

3 hours ago, outtoseacruise said:

Prior to COVID and Post COVID I add the T-Mobile 15GB International Data Pass to my hotspot and cell ($50 each per month) since it gives me the 15GB of international data on each plus calls and text international on the cell. 

 

For someone spending significant time travelling internationally, you might be better off with Google Fi Unlimited Plus. It provides 50 GB per month of international data, which can be used for tethering. I have used it extensively over the last several years, including the two I lived in the Netherlands as an expat.

 

My experience with Fi is described here in post #79

 

[Steelers36]

On 5/4/2023 at 11:16 PM, gvre said:

Just ran speed test at home:

166.6

Mbps download

9.04

Mbps upload

Latency: 28 ms

Server: San Francisco Bay Area

Your Internet connection is very fast.

 

Think if you get this on a ship!

I can beat that with 324 down and 29.7 up.  Hah!!!  😉

 

[Steelers36]

On 5/5/2023 at 2:49 PM, Yowman said:

 

 

My (home) office:

 

WOW!!   Warp speed. 

[longterm]

14 hours ago, Mercruiser said:

 

For someone spending significant time travelling internationally, you might be better off with Google Fi Unlimited Plus. It provides 50 GB per month of international data, which can be used for tethering. I have used it extensively over the last several years, including the two I lived in the Netherlands as an expat.

 

My experience with Fi is described here in post #79

 

That's pretty pricey though; for $24 for 30 days using an Airalo eSIM, I can get 10GB of data, which would probably suffice for me. I don't expect to have to do any intl. calls though, so that's not really something I need. 

 

We just switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, with a monthly savings of about $100; T-Mobile provides free data & texting overseas, so even though the data throttles down after 5GB, it'll suffice for the daily tasks I have to perform on my servers in Atlanta. I haven't looked yet to see if T-Mobile has a daily international rate like Verizon and AT&T do ($10/day if you make any overseas calls or use their cell service in any way, maxes out at $100/month). 

 

Actually, as I type that, I see that's a better offer than the Google plan, since it maxes at $100, and would allow for unlimited calls for a max of $100--plus data and texting. But moving to T-Mobile was a good move--they paid off mine and my wife's phones (a max of $800 on each), plus the monthly cost is much lower.

[Mercruiser]

I'm glad you found a plan you are happy with.

[AZjohn]

On 5/7/2023 at 2:03 PM, Jeter02 said:

A good question to ask for those sailing on a princess ship that has starlink in Alaska or Europe is are you able to stream any movies from your phone /device.

Or a live game.

honestly that is all I want from streaming but wife would have different priorities 😆