TaylorTravels

1 hour ago, twangster said:

Royal didn't sell Starlink as anything.  They announced they were migrating to Starlink.  That's all they've "promised".  

If you book a hotel do they say who their internet provider is?  

I've done my share of working from cruise ships.  All the way to becoming Pinnacle.  That's a decent amount of cruising.  My remote work efforts were always built around moving most meetings to port days so I could use cellular as a backup because many times internet wasn't great, or a rain cloud moved through at the (not so) perfect time.  My work activities let me time shift as long as the work got done.  Not all remote work is compatible with cruising and/or satellite internet on land or at sea.  Royal has never promised internet availability 24 x 7, not before, and not with Starlink.  

I disagree. Read the press from RCCL about upgrading to Starlink. They sell it as being superior to Voom Surf and Stream. Thousands of people enjoyed fast speeds and now many people are complaining. We worked prior to Starlink and it was better than Starlink is now. You seem so quick to side with Royal. Work or just vacation, $223/ week for internet is not cheap and needs to deliver an adequate service. I don’t need to know what provider Marriott or Hyatt uses. I just know it works 99.9% of the time. That can’t be said about RCCL internet. 

1 hour ago, twangster said:

If they adopted ZTNA 10 years ago I could see the correlation but the ZScalers are for corporate use cases and wouldn't be used for guest traffic. 

Royal has throttled for a long time.  Back in the day of slow internet speeds it was thought to be a manner to create fair access.  Over the past 10 years or so networking experts have stopped recommending per user throttling especially for WiFi users since it tends to create RF congestion in the radio spectrum and actually makes it worse.  

The bigger part of the equation is that Starlink, well..., basically sucks right now.  Even for rural residential users who loved it at first are now loathing the slower Starlink speeds at higher costs.   

The next generation of Starlink v2-mini satellites was supposed to create some relief but they are having issues with the ones that just launched a few weeks ago.  They've stopped raising them to their final orbit and are looking to throw away several of them.  Pretty significant technology failure costing millions and further delaying any fix for the current poor performance.  

https://spacenews.com/spacex-experiencing-problems-with-first-upgraded-starlink-v2-satellites/

Terrible timing for a company that has a frustrated customer base:

https://futurism.com/starlink-internet-connection-problem

https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-speeds-continue-to-fall-in-the-us-canada-amid-network-congestion

 

It all just really sucks. We have been working from the cruise ships and it has been awesome. Now we are looking at cancelling in April and May because we can’t take the chance that the internet doesn’t work. We barely squeaked by in February. Do you see this problem resolving by September? I know nobody really knows but RCCL is going to have to do something? Go back to the previous system or stop selling Starlink as something it’s not. I hope they get something figured out because they are going to lose the cruisers who cruise monthly because they can work from the ship. 

On 3/8/2023 at 8:34 AM, Captain Cruise said:

From super fast speed to almost no speed, Royal Caribbean and Celebrity is slowly but surely throttling down the internet speeds they provide to guests. At frst, we were seeing speeds exceeding 200M download and many people, myself included, realized that we could work on the ship productively. That is seemingly coming to an end. ON Wonder, the speed have been cut down to around 1M from the initial rollout of 200M. Other ships , such as Grandeur, Mariner, and Indy have been reporting the same scenario. Right now, here on Vision, we still have 200M, although overnight the speed may have been cut as we are now seeing a 25M cap. 

These issues, intentionally implemented, are starting to impact the most loyal guests who work from the ships on a daily basis.

Could the throttling and wifi issues have anything to do with RCCL adopting Zscalers Zero Trust at the beginning of March? I am not an IT person but the addition and the throttling seem to coincide. Any thoughts? 

Any word yet if Starlink is active on Explorer now that dry dock is over? Upgraded cabins? Thx