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RCL offer new internet level ?


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I was just looking on My cruise planner for Spectrum of the Seas and I found three levels of internet :

 

1. Voom Surf Voyage - 12.79 $  PD

2. Voom Surf + Stream  - 15.99 $ PD

3. Voom High Speed - 18 $ PD

 

Now I wonder if the high speed is one level up and real faster than the regular surf + stream we all know or it is just a marketing thing  and they created  another level by limiting the surf + stream.

 

Interesting 

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Which ship and sailing are you seeing this for? Just checked my Cruise Planner and only shows regular Surf and Surf & Stream options.

I would guess this is something new for ships with full O3b internet; maybe they have found they can open up the pipes another level on those ships and get something closer to 10 MB/second instead of the current ~4 MB max with Surf & Stream.

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9 minutes ago, JLMoran said:

Which ship and sailing are you seeing this for? Just checked my Cruise Planner and only shows regular Surf and Surf & Stream options.

I would guess this is something new for ships with full O3b internet; maybe they have found they can open up the pipes another level on those ships and get something closer to 10 MB/second instead of the current ~4 MB max with Surf & Stream.

I can see in Spectrum of the seas , Best of Japan cruise out of China .

 

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14 minutes ago, Traveler said:

I can see in Spectrum of the seas , Best of Japan cruise out of China .

 

That makes me wonder if it’s actually anything new at all or just seeing if they can get more money out of the Chinese market by offering a “premium experience” even its the same as before just repackaged. 

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13 minutes ago, Andrew72681 said:

That makes me wonder if it’s actually anything new at all or just seeing if they can get more money out of the Chinese market by offering a “premium experience” even its the same as before just repackaged. 

For the research I will take the regular Stream one and will buy one hour of the high speed to check the differences 

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I asked Royal, as I had seen the same 3 options on my Spectrum cruise in December. I asked "Why 3 options rather than 2, and what's the difference?" and I got this:

Dear Kristi, you will enjoy faster internet compared to the VOOM Surf internet package if you were to purchase the VOOM hi-speed internet pacakge. Thank you. [sic]

So I reiterated "great, but why 3 options?" and got no response. 

I will be purchasing the hi-speed and I'll be very curious to see how "hi-speed" it is. I will report back! ? 

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One thing to consider.  It's possible different satellites are used in Asia and internet service in some countries may be subject to government oversight different than in the West.  

I know guests on the initial Spectrum sailings commented on poor internet but perhaps it has been optimized for the Asia satellites and didn't perform well while in transit to Asia.

Perhaps that accounts for the 3rd choice.  A choice that wouldn't be relevant or needed given the satellites and service here.

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14 hours ago, twangster said:

It's an option only spotted in Asia before.  However its not clear to me how it differs.

Perhaps a traveler who visits the region can let us know ?

Well , we will check in 105 days from now ?  will use one of the diamond free internet day to try the high speed for 60 minutes beside the regular internet I will have for the full week.

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9 hours ago, twangster said:

It's possible different satellites are used in Asia and internet service in some countries may be subject to government oversight different than in the West

Does this mean apps like Facebook and Facebook Messenger might not work on Spectrum of the Seas since it is not accessible in mainland China? 

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5 minutes ago, Rose City Cruiser said:

Does this mean apps like Facebook and Facebook Messenger might not work on Spectrum of the Seas since it is not accessible in mainland China? 

Might be although I believe RCL will try to be very careful around such things. I just hope my work VPN will work well there. 

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9 hours ago, KristiZ said:

^^This. DH will possibly need to work a bit. We have not had any issue on any of our other Asian cruises, even out of Hong Kong or Shanghai. So fingers crossed!

I experienced the same when we cruised from HK but then HK is not really China , but if you say the same was Ok from Shanghai I am very happy and sad . on one hand I will be able to connect and work on the other hand I will be able to connect and work during my vacation ?

 

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Just got off HOTS today . Internet was a joke, 8 days barely worked & got my money back half day at a time when it didnot work. Was very frustrating, not being able to coordinate anything with 25 friends and RC required everything to be booked via their site, so when it was down, noone, not even RC knew what to people had reservations for. 

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7 hours ago, RTripp said:

Just got off HOTS today . Internet was a joke, 8 days barely worked & got my money back half day at a time when it didnot work. Was very frustrating, not being able to coordinate anything with 25 friends and RC required everything to be booked via their site, so when it was down, noone, not even RC knew what to people had reservations for. 

Did you have Surf and Stream? Or Surf Voyage?

Harmony's wifi is among the best in the fleet, so I'm wondering why you had such a negative experience.

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Hi Matt, we had two plans...everyone on the ship and all of RC Associates did not have access to internet atleast one full day.  I bought one the VOOM surf and stream drink package, And i also bought one surf and stream pkg on its own. There were four of us, so only two of us had phones at a time, i bought an IPhone specifically for tjis cruise to congradulate myself for entering the 21st century. Our friends with Android phones, we did NOT get their messages the last two days for some reason, while iphones some messages did go through. RC CREDITED my money back for two full days...when we went to guest services... they never give you $ , they throw you a bottle of wine but not your money back from what i have read. Our first and last cruise. Too difficult to get things planned with more than 2 other people, we coordinated dinner reservations & went out the porthole the first day, most days we started dinner 30  to 45 min later than reservation and since dinner takes 2 hours & we spent 3 hours, we missed most evening events. RC just relied so much on the internet & when it went down ship wide everything was chaos.. the Associates went above and beyond and ran to make us guests happy.

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1 minute ago, RTripp said:

Our first and last cruise. Too difficult to get things planned with more than 2 other people, we coordinated dinner reservations & went out the porthole the first day, most days we started dinner 30  to 45 min later than reservation and since dinner takes 2 hours & we spent 3 hours, we missed most evening events. RC just relied so much on the internet & when it went down ship wide everything was chaos.. the Associates went above and beyond and ran to make us guests happy.

I'm surprised you're throwing out any possibility of future cruises over this, especially when you noted that even with it impacting the crew they were doing their darnedest to make you and everyone else happy. Pretty clearly something got FUBAR with the ship internet -- could be the satellite had a problem, maybe a main router went down, who knows -- and that will definitely cause some chaos, possibly including things like the payment terminals where they swipe your sea pass cards for beverages and such. But if the staff and crew were still doing their best to satisfy everyone, why would this event make you swear forever off of cruising?

Or am I misunderstanding what you were saying, and the internet outage was a problem on top of the other items you noted about late starts to dinner and things running long?

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Hi JLMoran, we had many issues. I did everything possible ahead of time to head off any issues or circumstances, so that we could enjoy this amazing trip we were planning for. There were four in my group and we traveled with 21 others. About half of us were first time cruisers, so the rest showed us the ropes. We ran into many, many , many people that were just as frustrated as us. Some had cruised on FOURTY cruises, most had been on about 10. Internet was down  for  ENTIRE days( i requested & got my $ back) , absolutely no way to communicate between groups. I did not bother to put out a message board since mean people could change what i wrote on where we were going or what our schedule was for the day. RC CHANGED start times for RC sponsored excursions and did not communicate to us(internet down so we had no way of knowing).  RC provided certificates for excursions in our rooms, that were not certificates, but dalled receipts & made  NO attempt to call our room or knock on our door to mention we had things to do before we could do the excursion. Begining tge first day, the dining times went out the porthole..usually 30 to 45 min later than our scheduled time, which meant instead of alloting 2 hours for dinner, it was 3 hours which dominoed into missing evening events. First 3 days this happened. I am handicapped, called and had it noted on my reservation just in case i needed help in a sitiation. There were SO many things, we are just dissapointed with RC. Their staff was excellent with working with what they given, but noone accepted the blame or took our input to try to improve. We asked for Managers, supervisors, to try to give suggestions on what went wtong and what they could have done all were busy or would go to our room. None did.  Items i paid fir, where our pirt was cancelled, i did NOT get my $ back and had to “prove” i bought it. ...i had printed everything out and got my money.. arcade cards i paid for did not work, got the assistant to help, no way to see how much $ on arcade card unless you go to guest services, ofcourse card did not work when we wanted it. Just over and over again. 

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