Starlink Internet could be coming to Royal Caribbean

[Greg R]

I'm currently on Harmony, it has been changed to Starlink. Sitting on the top deck, can see the antenna on top of the suite lounge. I'm not really doing much on the internet, no streaming but the service has been good.

[twangster]

Starlink receives approval for another 7,500 satellites.  There are currently around 3,500 Starlink satellites so this is a significant FCC approval that continues the build out towards the desired 30,000.  

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/01/fcc-authorizes-spacex-gen2-starlink-up-to-7500-satellites.html

The 2nd generation satellites approved will unlock new features and better coverage. 

[twangster]

Starlink outage briefly yesterday. 

https://spaceexplored.com/2022/11/30/psa-thousands-of-spacex-starlink-users-experiencing-outage/

Starlink is frequently under attack by Russian hackers because Starlink has been providing internet to Ukranian troops.  It's possible they succeeded disrupting the service yesterday. 

[AlmondFarmer]

15 hours ago, twangster said:

There are currently around 3,500 Starlink satellites so this is a significant FCC approval that continues the build out towards the desired 30,000. 

Do the names on the FCC’s need to match the names of the satellites to be approved? 

[twangster]

1 hour ago, AlmondFarmer said:

Do the names on the FCC’s need to match the names of the satellites to be approved? 

Yes and more importantly they expire in mere months.  

[ndml]

On 11/9/2022 at 4:42 PM, Matt said:

• Freedom of the Seas
• Independence of the Seas
• Liberty of the Seas
• Enchantment of the Seas
• Allure of the Seas
• Oasis of the Seas

Adventure and Anthem are in the process it seems (among others).

Any updates on Vision & older ships?

[MarcBerger]

13 hours ago, ndml said:

Any updates on Vision & older ships?

From what @twangster has said before, pretty sure their wiring is too obsolete for Starlink to be added.

[Cruiseandplay]

34 minutes ago, MarcBerger said:

From what @twangster has said before, pretty sure their wiring is too obsolete for Starlink to be added.

Adventure had it in November and it worked great. My understanding is that ALL ships in the fleet can and will receive the upgrade.

[twangster]

Royal will move Vision class if and when the cost justification to change satellite providers is there.  Enchantment is done since it was an O3b ship and they wanted to leave O3b as a provider to save money.  

The state of the WLAN infrastructure on any given ship is not a factor in the decision to implement Starlink.

When Royal upgraded the infrastructure in 2014 all ships were updated so Adventure, Navigator, Vision, Grandeur, Radiance, etc. are not materially different and quite frankly are going to work as well as wireless can work given all the metal and issues that all ships have. 

Short of placing access points inside cabins replacing the WLAN infrastructure won't see massive improvements to the customer experience and they won't be wiring any ships to place access points in cabins anytime soon.  

Worst case they migrate Vision to Starlink and their supplier costs go down 70% while the user experience doesn't change.   However I don't think it's a worst case scenario.  The WLAN infrastructure on Vision is capable of speeds approaching 100Mbs or better.  When they migrate Vision (or Grandeur/Rhapsody) it will be much like migrating Mariner, Navigator or Jewel.  It will be a better user experience.

The only question is coverage.  Are the old ladies sailing in regions where Starlink isn't ready yet?  It would be pointless to migrate a ship to Starlink then sail her into a region without Starlink coverage.  

For example, Ovation and Quantum are NOT migrating to Starlink right now because there is no Starlink maritime coverage in that region, today.  These ships have newer WLAN technology but with no Starlink coverage where they are sailing it would not make sense to migrate them and pay the monthly Starlink fee.

 

[twangster]

Oasis

 

 

[asquared17]

@twangster would you say these are these speeds good for oasis? seems like maybe they are?

[twangster]

15 minutes ago, asquared17 said:

@twangster would you say these are these speeds good for oasis? seems like maybe they are?

I feel like Royal is testing different speeds to find a go-forward strategy.   Symphony has the same per user limits.  

Compared to land and other cruise lines it's not that great.  Welcome to 2005.   But given Royal's approach to technology, rooted years behind, it's good?

[BrianB]

Onboard Anthem right now. We left CocoCay at 5pm and on our way to Nassau.

[twangster]

18 minutes ago, BrianB said:

Onboard Anthem right now. We left CocoCay at 5pm and on our way to Nassau.

You are in a good Starlink coverage zone.

[smokeybandit]

@twangsterI saw you're a stringer for RC's social media marketing desk now

 

[twangster]

14 minutes ago, smokeybandit said:

@twangsterI saw you're a stringer for RC's social media marketing desk now

 

Good times!  Used with permission, all is good.

Really hoping Starlink internet will be available on Alaska ships next year.

[AlmondFarmer]

1 hour ago, twangster said:

Good times!  Used with permission, all is good.

Permission not given for wipe out photo taken 5 seconds later?

[twangster]

The 16 Starlink antennas on Oasis:

12 in a semi-circle at the edge of the SL/CK roof

4 on top of the Suite Sun Deck.

2 on Port.

2 on Starboard

[Ampurp85]

@twangster I am on Oasis next month and may need to do some work. I keep hearing reports that the starlink internet is worse than the original.  Will I have issues with Zoom, Teams or Wi-Fi calling?

[twangster]

2 hours ago, Ampurp85 said:

@twangster I am on Oasis next month and may need to do some work. I keep hearing reports that the starlink internet is worse than the original.  Will I have issues with Zoom, Teams or Wi-Fi calling?

My experience on Oasis for the past 4 days was the worst Voom experience I've ever had other than sailing in Alaska.  It was similar to an Alaska cruise where there were moments of a normal Voom experience but mostly just terribly slow extremely frustrating internet. 

My corporate VPN would stay up from minutes to an hour or two before dropping.  Latency was highly variable.  Ping tests yielded 20% to 60% packet loss.

I feel like something is wrong.  They have a bad cable or fiber patch, bad transceiver, defective modem(s) or something else in the path is broken.  They are load balancing across 15 of those 16 Starlink antennas so if one or more have an issue it presents itself in weird ways.  It felt like when demand was higher during sea days for example the problem presented itself more.  During off peak like early morning whatever is broken didn't seem to be as apparent.  

VoIP calls mostly worked but at times there was audio breakup.  

I feel like it only worked sort of okay when Oasis was very near Florida or near another gateway city, or off peak when most guests would be sleeping.

There were moments when I felt like they had found something and fixed it.  During those times it worked well and I could stream and VPN without worries.

Then all of a sudden it was like I was on 2021 Mariner when you couldn't get WiFi calling to stay connected.  This would last for several hours.  VPN would drop or stop working every 20 seconds.  Remote sessions controlling a computer took hours to perform simple tasks.  It would take an hour to do what should take 5 minutes.

I had a two device plan so I had my laptop connected and my phone connected.  Both had issues.  I was very near an access point so it wasn't a WiFi problem or a suspect device.  I carry a spare phone and tried it for a while which was no different so it's not an Android versus Apple thing.  I tried different spots on the ship.  It was bad everywhere.  

Normally I can send SMS and MMS through WiFi calling.  This was mostly broken with numerous "failed to send" errors.  Sometimes they went through but mostly they didn't.   Simple text messaging worked okay but anything that required more throughput was problematic.

I sure hope they find whatever is broken before your cruise.  If nothing changes it could be a challenging time to work remotely from Oasis.  If all you need is basic text to work you may be okay. 

[twangster]

Starlink may be launching a variant of the next gen v2 satellites soon.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-first-starlink-gen2-satellite-launch-2022/

This is important because it was previously stated they would not launch them on Falcon 9 but only launch v2 on Starship.  Starship has been delayed so if they do find a way to begin launching v2 mini on Falcon 9 that could help the maritime service sooner rather than later.

[twangster]

In related news, Starlink arrives in New Zealand.

https://www.teslarati.com/starlink-becomes-available-in-new-zealand-through-retailer-noel-leeming/

And...  Celebrity Eclipse is now using Starlink down under.

https://www.cruisemapper.com/news/11190-celebrity-eclipse-internet-spacex-starlink-satellite-network

• Celebrity Cruises started offering internet services via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network onboard its Celebrity Eclipse ship, making it the first and only sailing in the South Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand to provide the service.

[smokeybandit]

Starlink on Mariner

 

 

[BrianB]

On the Anthem now. Coming up the east coast after leaving Nassau the day before yesterday. Heavy cloud cover. Speeds have been all over the place this cruise. Maybe they’re still tweaking it. Usually download speeds have been between 3 and 8. Sometimes in the teens and twenties. No problem streaming HD movies on Prime, Netflix and YouTube in my room on deck 7 mid.

Then….this. I’m sitting just outside Sorrento’s at 7:51 Christmas morning.

[twangster]

22 minutes ago, BrianB said:

On the Anthem now. Coming up the east coast after leaving Nassau the day before yesterday. Heavy cloud cover. Speeds have been all over the place this cruise. Maybe they’re still tweaking it. Usually download speeds have been between 3 and 8. Sometimes in the teens and twenties. No problem streaming HD movies on Prime, Netflix and YouTube in my room on desk 7 mid.

Then….this. I’m sitting just outside Sorrento’s at 7:51 Christmas morning.

Not too shabby at all.  Merry Christmas indeed!

[BrianB]

On the Anthem...holiday cruise. Mostly families. 

There are 4,700 guests onboard. I went to Guest Services twice just to make sure. That's well over the full capacity with double occupancy number...and just a few hundred short of total maximum capacity with every bed taken (4,900). 

The crew is roughly 1,500. 

According to the internet manager, nearly 70% of all passengers have wifi. Along with 100% of the crew.

Lots of kids also means lots and lots of wifi devices being used.

The manager says wifi has been working well. They have maintained a pretty high download/upload number and latency has been good due to the lower orbit of the Starlink satellites. He noted that high wifi usage at one time in high traffic areas would lower speeds as the local hardware handling the signals would share the available space that the device could handle...and that's why the service fluctuates in different areas at different times.

So far, for me...IMO...wifi has been good. I stream Netflix, Prime, Messenger video calls and YouTube and the service has been up to the challenge. More so than the old service.

Again...just my experience onboard the Anthem...sailing primarily up and down the east coast of the US and the Bahamas. YMMV elsewhere. 

[WAAAYTOOO]

Voom was horrible on both of my Oasis cruises this past week-and-a-half.

[GregD]

5 hours ago, WAAAYTOOO said:

Voom was horrible on both of my Oasis cruises this past week-and-a-half.

great......this should make my February cruise fun. How am I supposed to keep the people happy and blog about my travels? (kidding of course)

I bet the assessment by @twangster earlier is correct. There is probably an issue in their hardware, and has been there for some time. When we were on Oasis last year the internet was terrible, even by earlier voom standards. I was constantly having to reconnect, and I would have terrible time staying online no matter where I was on the ship, and what time of day it was. 

I had a better experience on Anthem while in Norway that I did on Oasis in the Caribbean, which given the latitude, shouldn't be the case.

[BrianB]

I’m guessing the hardware on the Anthem is better able to handle the new system as it was originally designed to be a more ‘digital friendly’ ship when it was built in 2015.  
Even so….I see on FB there are many onboard this sailing who are not having a good experience with the WiFi. Many complaints of frequent drop offs…repeated restarts…dead areas. But, as I posted earlier…for me, it’s been fine. 

I have an older Samsung Galaxy S8 phone and a new iPad 10th gen. Both have been working very well. In the Promenade Cafe, Solarium, theater, MDR on deck 4 and my room on deck 7 aft. Even the specialty dining restaurants. Many are during high traffic times. The only place I had a drop off was while sitting in the front row of the theater. 
I hope other passengers have an improved experience and get what they expected.

[twangster]

On Anthem in some cabins I had bad wifi coverage especially when the desk was closer to the balcony.  In those cases I use a water bottle to prop open the door which is all it takes to let enough signal in for the wifi to be useable.  The same has occured on Ovation, Quantum and Odyssey.  It's not a newer vs. older technology problem.  

On Jewel the wifi was rock solid.  A friend who sailed on her first Starlink cruise reported initially they retained the 4 x 2 per user limit but after a few days they removed it and he was getting results like Anthem has been getting over 100Mbps.  

There will always be wifi challenges.  The ship is all metal.  Doors, walls, ceilings and floors.  In a normal building an access point mounted on a ceiling on one floor would provide some sort of coverage to the floor above.  That is less so when the floor is made of metal.  Metal also bounces the signal causing reflections and multipathing.    Drywall and concrete tend to absorb signals and let some signal through more than bounce the signal but there is no drywall or concrete used on a ship. 

A ship will always be a challenging wifi environment and there will always be dead spots.  Newer ships are at least putting access points inside each cabin so that eliminates a very important weak coverage area from a guest perspective.  

[BrianB]

Final update for this cruise....

On the Anthem...holiday cruise...ship at near total capacity (4700 passengers)...hundreds more than total double occupancy capacity. 

Final sea day. In the Solarium, which is packed. So much so that getting a lounger resembles the Hunger Games.

Still very good wifi...I have an older Samsung Galaxy S8 Android phone. No problem. 

However, I keep seeing lots of passengers on this cruise complaining on FB about lousy wifi...difficulties connecting, drop offs, slow, no internet at all. I don't get it. I tried finding the same issues using both my phone and my new iPad 10 all around the ship. I had good service this whole cruise. Even video-messenging during last night's New Year's Eve countdown on the Esplanade. I can't explain why others are having issues. I went back to my room on deck 7 shortly after midnight and streamed HD Netflix without a problem. I don't understand why others are having such miserable service.

[twangster]

29 minutes ago, BrianB said:

Final update for this cruise....

On the Anthem...holiday cruise...ship at near total capacity (4700 passengers)...hundreds more than total double occupancy capacity. 

Final sea day. In the Solarium, which is packed. So much so that getting a lounger resembles the Hunger Games.

Still very good wifi...I have an older Samsung Galaxy S8 Android phone. No problem. 

However, I keep seeing lots of passengers on this cruise complaining on FB about lousy wifi...difficulties connecting, drop offs, slow, no internet at all. I don't get it. I tried finding the same issues using both my phone and my new iPad 10 all around the ship. I had good service this whole cruise. Even video-messenging during last night's New Year's Eve countdown on the Esplanade. I can't explain why others are having issues. I went back to my room on deck 7 shortly after midnight and streamed HD Netflix without a problem. I don't understand why others are having such miserable service.

Some people are using protection services from AT&T, or Apple, or Google, that basically use a VPN which doesn't work well on the ship.  The VPN part is okay and it connects but then the device can't reach the DNS servers on the ship so the VPN drops and they get temporary service, then the cycle repeats, etc.

They also warn people to disable the random MAC features that both Apple and Android have in their newest OS but are called different things.  Few people know how to do this or think about it.

Companies like Apple and Google roll out new features without thinking it through.  They don't work well in all scenarios.  

[twangster]

Apple in particular has gotten really bad in the manner it decides if an internet connection is working or not.  If an Apple device can't reach iCloud it declares that connection useless and therefore not an viable connection.  

There is a specific manner you have to connect without a Voom package to use the app connected to wifi on board.  That basically tricks the Apple device to go ahead and use a connection even though it can't reach Apple on the internet through that connection.  Apple has outsmarted themselves.  

So in some cases it's the smart device being totally dumb in its approach to networking.

[asquared17]

10 hours ago, twangster said:

They also warn people to disable the random MAC features that both Apple and Android have in their newest OS but are called different things.  Few people know how to do this or think about it.

Companies like Apple and Google roll out new features without thinking it through.  They don't work well in all scenarios.  

is this why it had me turn off “beta relay” last month?? 

i didn’t understand (didn’t even remember why i turned it on in the first place tbh) but i had never had to do that step before. 

[twangster]

27 minutes ago, asquared17 said:

is this why it had me turn off “beta relay” last month?? 

i didn’t understand (didn’t even remember why i turned it on in the first place tbh) but i had never had to do that step before. 

Yes.  Apple's Relay service runs things through iCloud and hides your DNS queries.  That can be the problem since it diverts your DNS away from the ship but to get things on board in the app and to sign in you need the ships DNS.

[ScottD]

Sounds like I'll be glad I have all samsung\android operating phones and laptops! 

[twangster]

1 hour ago, ScottD said:

Sounds like I'll be glad I have all samsung\android operating phones and laptops! 

For Android you'll want to go into the WiFi settings and make sure Randomize MAC is not enabled.  This can mess up Androids and cause the ship to not recognize that you already signed into a Voom internet plan.  

On land "Randomize" is a good feature when connecting to various free internet such as a coffee shop or retail store since they can't track you as an individual but on the ship "randomize" will cause the ship to force you to sign in over and over again since it can't recognize it's you every time your phone randomizes the MAC address.

On the ship choose "Phone MAC".

 

Also, Google tries to get people to enable their free "protection" service so they can track your every internet byte.  This can also mess with ship DNS servers so Android isn't any better than Apple.

Whenever I hear people complaining of frequent disconnects and being "kicked off"  its almost always their device settings, not the fault of the ship wifi.  

[twangster]

If you are at home or off the ship in general, "logout.com" is a real internet website you can visit.

When you are on the ship, the ship uses "logout.com" to re-direct your web browser to the "iCafe"  Voom login page.  

The ship's DNS servers do this and send you to their ship based Voom login page.  It's works fine, unless your device isn't letting you reach the ship's DNS servers.  

The "protection" services from Apple like Apple Relay, AT&T's "Secure WiFi" or Google's "Google One" VPN block your access to the ship DNS servers.  These services make it like you are not on the ship.  It's great you are "protected" but they can interfere with the ability to connect to the ship's WiFi.  

Combined with "Randomize MAC" on Android or "Private WiFi Address" on Apple and it's a recipe for constant disconnects and having a hard time connecting.   

Most users don't understand the inner workings of all this techy stuff.  Their devices worked fine on land but now on the ship it connects then drops.  Then they have to sign in again, or they can't sign in because their own device is not allowing them to reach the ship's DNS servers.   

On land a device can fallback to cellular data which is often done in the background without users knowing.  On a ship hopefully you are in airplane mode but that means there is no cellular data to fallback on.  

It's frustrating that both Apple and Android have resorted to enabling these newer features by default.  These options were silently added over the past few years and silently became the default.  After all both Apple and Android/Google know what's best for you, right?

If someone is having issues connecting or dropping ship WiFi it's them (their device), not the ship 9.9 out of 10 times.  

[cruisellama]

On 12/25/2022 at 7:40 AM, twangster said:

Not too shabby at all.  Merry Christmas indeed!

Has Starlink faired better in precipitation vs legacy satellite system?

[twangster]

19 minutes ago, cruisellama said:

Has Starlink faired better in precipitation vs legacy satellite system?

O3b on Princess has never been rate limited per user like Royal does so it has always been faster than O3b on Royal and along the lines of what some users on Royal ships without the per user speed limits are achieving with Starlink.

O3b has been demonstrated substantially higher speeds on cruise ships blowing Starlink single antenna maritime speeds out of the water.  

However we know that Royal is installing many Starink antennas.  Eight on small ships, sixteen on mega ships.  I can think of no viable reason to install 16 antennas on Oasis unless the plan is to aggregate them to achieve higher throughput.  IF that is the case then the Starlink solution as deployed by Royal may be faster than the previously known record set by O3b.  

In the current approach where Royal is still using per user speed caps it's hard to know for sure.  All the bandwidth in the world available to the ship is utterly useless with a per user speed limit applied.  

I feel like Royal hasn't decided what to do.  Until they do anything is possible, and not possible at the same time.