Next-gen internet at sea

Twenty-four seconds were left in the Dolphins-Ravens game, and Jeff Stepp sank nervously into his corner of the pool. He and a half-dozen members of his family had yelled and cheered for the past hour while staring at his phone, which leaned against the base of a pool lift on Royal Caribbean International’s Freedom of the Seas. Their Dolphins were down by an agonizing three points.

The internet reception had been great for this NFL game, Stepp told me during a commercial break. The stream froze once, but that was better than the day before; the signal was glitchy during the Miami Hurricanes college football game, and Stepp had to reload the video several times while eating in the main dining room on Deck 4 and hanging out at the Playmakers bar on Deck 5. 

He said he had sprung for the Surf and Stream internet package so he could talk and Facetime with his kids back home — but that he’d be lying if he said the football games had nothing to do with it.

Cruise passengers today expect to be able to stay connected to their sports teams, loved ones and social media while on vacation, and internet access has become an essential amenity on ships. But that connectedness has created a challenge for lines as they try to keep up with usage trends that exceed merely emailing and texting. Guests and crew expect to stay connected to their businesses, families and finances. 

Although internet speed on land has steadily become quicker, connectivity at sea is more complex, and cruise lines have struggled to keep pace. Having sailed seven ships in the past nine months, I’ve found the internet strength has often been temperamental at best, and at worst, once ships have left port, so has connectivity. Scrolling and posting to Instagram was often annoyingly slow, if not impossible, and emails would sometimes refuse to leave my outbox. Even searching the internet to read about the ship I was on often meant waiting minutes for a page to load. 

Henry Dennis, a leisure travel advisor for Frosch in Charlotte, said it has been years since a client asked whether they’ll be able to get internet on the ship — they assume they will, and they also assume that it won’t be as good as on land. But he said promises of speedy internet have often fallen short for him, including an “awful” experience with a basic internet package on a May sailing on Royal’s Ovation of the Seas to Alaska. “It took 10-plus minutes for pages to load, if they would even load,” he said.

“I do think that all cruise lines are overpromising and underdelivering on their internet service while charging outrageous fees, and passengers are beginning to notice and question the cost,” he said.

Martha Poulter, chief information officer for Royal Caribbean Group, said people tend not to think about the challenges of providing internet at sea because they’re wired on land, whether they’re at a coffee shop or their home. Internet signals on land travel through wires, but “we have a floating city. That floating city has no wire. It has to go over air,” where the signal loses about half its speed, she said. And it’s a challenge to keep it up.

How it works

Internet signals beam down from one of three types of satellites circling the Earth. Geostationary satellites are the legacy devices cruise lines have long relied on. They are stationary relative to Earth and orbit at an altitude of 22,000 miles, providing coverage to ships when they are far away from shore connections, including far northern or southern latitudes. Low Earth orbit satellites are the closest to the planet’s surface, just 1,200 miles above, and medium Earth orbit satellites are somewhere in the middle. Unlike their geostationary predecessors, medium and low Earth orbit satellites are nimble and can move about. Also, the closer a satellite is to the Earth’s surface, the lower the latency, which is the time it takes for a piece of data to reach your phone or computer, so low Earth orbit satellites provide lower latency than the others.

But when providing service at sea, none can compare with the speed of land-based, wired internet distribution over fiber optics, cable and DSL.

New Kid on the Block

Starlink, an internet service developed by SpaceX, employs a constellation of thousands of satellites. It’s the new kid on the block, and cruise lines are beginning to experiment with it. 

After a trial run on the Freedom of the Seas months before the Stepp family watched the Dolphins come back to chalk up a win, Royal Caribbean Group decided to install Starlink internet service across its fleet. By the end of Q1 of 2023, it will be installed on all Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises ships. Not only did the switch provide shorter latency (and faster speeds) but also better bandwidth: The Freedom of the Seas now has six to eight times the internet capacity it used to have, according to executives.

“We would not imagine three or four years ago that we were going to be making video calls while on a cruise ship. We need to skate to the where the puck is here, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” said Jason Liberty, CEO of Royal Caribbean Group.

Hurtigruten said it will have Starlink available aboard all its ships by late October.

Carnival Corp. would not comment on whether it is currently testing new internet providers but said it is “constantly assessing new technologies” for the next provider to up its game, including those using low Earth orbit technology.

Windstar, too, is working on beefing up its internet access. The six-ship line added bandwidth this year with Anuvu, a traditional satellite vendor using a geostationary satellite typical of the industry. However, the line is planning a 60-day Starlink trial in October in hopes of sewing together a set of internet providers to cover the line as it moves ships from one region to another.

Starlink could potentially have good coverage, said Gregg Wagner, Windstar’s director of IT, but the provider has its limitations. Because their signals originate from land before beaming down to your phone or laptop, Starlink’s coverage areas are largely along the coasts. That means trying to get a signal in the Pacific Ocean in Tahiti, where Windstar is dedicating one of its ships, isn’t doable via Starlink, he said.

“There are places that Starlink doesn’t have an ability to get to, including French Polynesia, where we sail year-round. We need to figure out a solution there,” Wagner said. If the trial works out, he said, Windstar hopes to use Starlink to augment its internet access on four or five of its ships, leaving out only its French Polynesia-dedicated vessel.

“We’re in a period where we’re shifting to new technology coming out, and that new technology is not everywhere,” said Wagner.

For a cruise line like Windstar, whose ships don’t have dedicated homeports, internet access is complicated. That means working with cellular companies across the globe to connect to towers when near land on its varying itineraries. But a ship like the Freedom of the Seas, which sails a similar itinerary year-round, is likely to have regular internet agreements with fewer complications.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth, whether on land or sea, is by definition restricted, requiring cruise lines to determine what capacity to offer. Windstar, like some others, asks guests to choose among varying “packages” that align with different bandwidth limits, such as one for surfing the internet and sending emails and another for streaming. Wagner said this self-selection tends to ensure that passengers aren’t all engaging in high-bandwidth activities, such as scrolling TikTok, at the same time, which would slow down connectivity for everyone.

Passengers want to post their Instagrammable moments and share in real-time, said Royal Caribbean’s Poulter. The trend toward more graphic-heavy video and pictures has often meant that passengers reluctantly held off posting until they got to port.

“The demand and our appetite [for the internet] is growing exponentially,” she said. “Those demands will continue to force us to look at solutions. Starlink happens to be game-changing because it offers capabilities we haven’t been able to achieve before.”

Royal’s Shift to Starlink

On my three-night cruise on the Freedom of the Seas in September, which called at Perfect Day at CocoCay and in Nassau, I put its Starlink connection to the test. My FaceTime phone call after breakfast went through without freezing or glitches on my end, although the screen froze several times for the person I was talking with, usually catching me awkwardly snacking on a chunk of pineapple. (Fortunately, the frozen screen dislodged quickly enough that the person on the other end was never able to capture a screenshot.) It’s impossible to know at which end the glitch occurred. 

I later watched a seven-minute video on Disney Plus. The video skipped twice early on before calming down and enabling me to watch the rest uninterrupted. 

And on a lengthy Zoom call from my laptop on the last night of the cruise, I had no disruptions on my side of the call with clear video and good audio. On the other end, my fellow Zoomer said the sound occasionally dropped out but that it was overall a solid connection.

Previously, Royal Caribbean Group brands had tight limitations that restricted how much bandwidth they could provide for each guest to have a good experience, but Poulter said they no longer have that constraint. Before the upgrade to Starlink, the Freedom of the Seas was getting 300 megabytes of data per second. Now, said Poulter, it’s getting as much as 1.2 gigabytes.

At the moment, she said, the company isn’t looking to raise prices for internet access but rather to test demand. Some users want to do the basics: text and email in nearly real time, which costs $25.99 per day. Others want to stream for $32.99 per day. While the company is experimenting with prices, she said she doesn’t expect they’ll charge much.

“We’re not really looking for more. We’re looking to figure out how to drive the right price point,” she said. 

Andy Schwalb, chief technology officer at Virgin Voyages, said the line provides internet for free.

“The expectation is, ‘Look, I’m connected everywhere in my normal life. Why would that be any different when I get on a ship?’” Schwalb said. “‘I want to have a Zoom call. I want to work from wherever. I want to send pictures and Instagram shots to my friends that show I’m having a good time.’ All those things are an expectation, and we are different than most competitors because we give it away.”

While Virgin Voyages offers internet service free of charge, guests will need to opt into a premium package for $50 if they want to stream. That’s in order to control how much bandwidth is used at any given time. Virgin also uses technology to prioritize certain activities over others; for instance, live calls on WhatsApp over emails, which can be sent out delayed a few moments.

This is all part of making a product that not only caters to vacationers but also to passengers who want to work remotely aboard the ship.

The latter, Schwalb said, “is just becoming the norm: Work from anywhere and do anything.”