Internet speed test on Sky

[dhanakorn]

This’s the first time I am on a ship with Starlink. The internet speed on my past few cruises was horribly slow. It’s barely usable. While the speed from Starlink isn’t super fast, I think it’s much better improvement from my previous experience. With this speed, you could do zoom call or connecting to Remote Desktop to do some work while on a cruise. 

This is testing somewhere near Bonaire.

 

[dhanakorn]

I’m on 12-day cruise so I get 300 minutes from FAS. 300-minute plan is valued at $145 for upgrade. The best day to upgrade is on Day 4. After that you won’t get further discount. I think $125 to upgrade isn’t too bad. 

[Rick&Jeannie]

I have more experience with Starlink on Princess ships as well as the system they were using (SES Networks) prior to their switching.  Starlink was a huge improvment...not so much from a speed gain (though obviously there was an increase)...but more so from a more consistent throughput.  With the old system there would be many times when you just could not get any usable repsonse while with Starlink...it might be slow but you always *seemed* to maintain a connection.  This was seen on a TA sailing as well as an Alaskan sailing...which was notorious for bad staelite signal being so far north.  While 1,89 Mbps is certainly not "blazing"...you should be able to do most anything you want to do, but I admit that I never tried to do streaming or Zoom meetings or video calls while on board.

[BirdTravels]

The "speed" you get has to do with what the cruise line give you. I had identical bandwidth (2MB) on the Viva, NCL's newest ship.

 

But, last month on a converted Royal Caribbean ship

 

 

Last week on an MSC ship, I was only getting 3.2MB down and 0.6MB up. The MSC was kinda bad, consistently dropping WiFi calls. Seemed to be more stable using Facetime. 

 

[ColdCruise]

Sky’s Starlink (Feb/Mar 24)  was slower than Viva’s Starlink (Nov 23). They probably upgraded the satellite communications equipment but did not upgrade the ships total IT infrastructure. Speeds in our deck 7 forward OV cabin were noticeably slower than on open decks and public spaces.p; also it also dropped connections in the cabin.
 

I’ll check for the screenshots from both sailings and post.

[Rick&Jeannie]

9 hours ago, ColdCruise said:

Sky’s Starlink (Feb/Mar 24)  was slower than Viva’s Starlink (Nov 23). They probably upgraded the satellite communications equipment but did not upgrade the ships total IT infrastructure. Speeds in our deck 7 forward OV cabin were noticeably slower than on open decks and public spaces.p; also it also dropped connections in the cabin.
 

I’ll check for the screenshots from both sailings and post.

More likely the ship is "throttling" the available speed.  Even if the ship had ancient 10MB/s infrastructure there should not be a bottleneck to the wifi.

[ColdCruise]

Maybe but not entirely buying throttling. I saw the archaic devices they’re still using 

[The Traveling Man]

On 3/24/2024 at 9:23 PM, BirdTravels said:

The "speed" you get has to do with what the cruise line give you. I had identical bandwidth (2MB) on the Viva, NCL's newest ship.

 

But, last month on a converted Royal Caribbean ship

 

 

Last week on an MSC ship, I was only getting 3.2MB down and 0.6MB up. The MSC was kinda bad, consistently dropping WiFi calls. Seemed to be more stable using Facetime. 

 

That's faster on the download than my service at home, but the upload side is less than one-fourth my home connection.

[The Traveling Man]

On 3/24/2024 at 6:26 PM, dhanakorn said:

This’s the first time I am on a ship with Starlink. The internet speed on my past few cruises was horribly slow. It’s barely usable. While the speed from Starlink isn’t super fast, I think it’s much better improvement from my previous experience. With this speed, you could do zoom call or connecting to Remote Desktop to do some work while on a cruise. 

This is testing somewhere near Bonaire.

 

That really is very slow.

[Jazzfta12]

The 2 mbps is 100% throtttling.   No wifi router is that slow and Starlink would be out of business delivering interent at that speed!

[dhanakorn]

I don't think it's a bad idea that NCL throttles the speed. 2Mbps is fast enough for most users as long as the quality is good.

 

There's definitely a bandwidth limit for the whole ship. If 4,000 passengers are trying to connect to internet at the same time, without throttling some passengers could get around ang hog all bandwidth for themselves.