RCCL charges, last time I checked, $20/day (which does not seem onerous for access to high speed internet on the ocean) for customers to use internet on each vessel (this might have changed, haven't been on one of their boats since COVID started). Access for crew and staff is heavily subsidized as a perk. This is more of a high volume customer selecting a vendor who can provide a better offering (versus O3b MEO [1]) at possibly a better cost (at volume) imho. TLDR SpaceX via Starlink is eating the TAM of disparate satellite data providers (Iridium via T-mobile partnership and direct US DoD sales, O3B and OneWeb via mobile terminals and high end marine/aircraft deals, etc). When you've made enough rockets, you go where the margin is (which, for global satellite comms, is ~$75B/year).
We paid like $350 for a couples massage on a cruise. It was almost worth it, until in our relaxed state the spa workers tried to sell us $80 lemon water claiming it would cure chronic diseases, and my blood pressure shot up to its max.
> RCCL charges, last time I checked, $20/day (which does not seem onerous for access to high speed internet on the ocean)
This seems quite high to me. $20/day for a full working day of access, fine. But for checking my email once a day while on holiday to see if anything urgent has come in? That's excessive!
They could offer the ‘are you feeling lucky’ package.
Free all day every day to check to see if something urgent has come in… $200 an hour to use VPN / Web to fix that something urgent.
This is how I managed to break the cycle of checking work things on my latest holiday. Was I actually going to do anything about ‘something urgent’ there and then? No? Well don’t bother checking.
This assumes you're checking it for work reasons, and not for, say, healthcare, or financial reasons.
Plenty of people have reasons to check email that are not about work, and where they could reasonably need to be contactable. It's quite a privilege in many ways to be able to fully disconnect.
If you're in a situation where you might urgently need to check an email then boarding a boat and going out in to the middle of the ocean as far from an Internet connection as humanly possible is probably an less than optimal IT strategy.
If you or a loved one has potentially urgent healthcare issues - then a cruise is not sensible.
I've had relatives who have had to cancel in the past because of this - travel insurance is a good investment (and there's a reason it gets more expensive the older / sicker you get...)
My general point here is, something, anything, urgent has come up. What're you gonna do? Swim to shore? I can think of the convenience of forgetting to pay a bill and then doing it online - in which case it's up to you to figure if whatever internet fee you pay would save you on potential late fees.
Being out of contact was often the absolutely normal state of affairs until 25 years or so ago. If you must be reachable, stay by the phone. Otherwise, someone may not be able to get in touch with you right now in many circumstances.
People will gladly pay $10,$20, $30 dollars without flinching for things line cigarettes or alcohol. I would bet people are more addicted to the internet then those things. Not a lot of people can disconnect easily like us HN crowd /s.
Also from my recent experience on RCCL, it was not working all day. I would attempt to refresh a messaging app periodically during the day and have it fail half the time.
This is my experience as well. Just came back from RCCL last week. We bought the "Streaming" package for internet access ($100+ for 7 days). But we couldn't get any connection half of the time.
their onboard networks are frequently oversaturated amd. most of the boats in service are over 20 years old and lack the infrastructure, with wifi networks pieced together with cheap consumer grade hardware. The RC cruise I went on for my bachelor party a few years back had el cheapo Netgear routers dotted around the coridoors, ziptied to cat5 cables in turn ziptied to exiting lines and conduits, which gave us a chuckle.
How many cruises go out of reach of cellular networks for many days? Mediterannean cruises should be within reach od EU cellular networks most of the time.
Emphasis on the Mediterranean. Right, you have free data roaming in EU, but the world is a much bigger place. Those cruise lines operate all over the world where getting a local SIM card with any amount of data is usually inconvenient or sometimes impossible. Satellite internet is usually the only way you can get online while on a cruise ship in a lot of countries and it is an extremely desired amenity onboard. Have no internet for any reason for an hour (and that happened a lot in some places), thats all fun, don't have it for a day, and you'll get almost a mutiny. Also satellite internet is very much needed for crew and navigation.
My point being that having relatively cheap and reliable internet on a cruise ship is a big pro even if your cruise is in Med. I'm sure that absolutely every cruise line is trying to get starlink terminals onboard as soon as possible.
cruise ships, like airlines are notorious penny pinchers. this is more for publicity than anything. keep in mind that beams are full now will only a couple thousand active users, which is what these large ships have. they'll have to charge a lot to keep the usage down.
Please note I have not cruised the last two years, but I remember there was something like a $5 a day option on Carnival for email only, no web browse just email.
Each ship can then split the bandwidth up into nice rentable subsets and charge an arm and a leg to guests so they can watch YouTube.