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Starlink Internet could be coming to Royal Caribbean


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11 hours ago, twangster said:

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.  

By chance, do you know what is set ny default by Apple?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just got off of Grandeur.  I’ve never sailed on her before.  AWFUL internet.  I had an OV forward deck 3.  I use internet after 11pm and it was almost non existent.  Texts would go through whenever it connected, forget replies. Unable to surf/load pages, facetime. I called Guest services at midnight to register the complaint.  When I met with the internet assist onboard she said to try to move cabins to deck 4 where “it’s the best service”.  Guest service wouldn’t permit a move until the specialist entered my cabin and ran tests. (Consisting of loading pages on her phone)  my move was granted after dinner  to 4 doors down the hall on the same deck.  Internet worked spotty for a day.  5 night cruise I could only do 1 poor quality facetime at midnight. 

Anyhow, they are slated for starlink in February.  I hope that helps.  Internet assistance said Explorer was updated to Starlink and is still having problems due to routers.

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  • 2 weeks later...
1 hour ago, twangster said:

In process.  Some ships have been converted but the general consensus seemed to be they were lagging behind Royal with conversions.  

Thanks for the information. There a website to see which ships have it? Looking specifically for Summit we'll be doing Alaska in 2024.

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On Anthem this week it was honestly pretty good all week. Worst part is the mesh network. You learn the dead zones. The pub on Anthem is the pits. Then right outside at Sorrentos is blazing full speed. Every once in a while your device gets stuck on a weak access point and won't switch to the closer stronger AP unless you turn off, turn on your wifi.  It was pretty good in my cabin although a couple of times it would obviously switch to a weaker AP for no apparent reason. The old TOTO on the wifi would fix it. HBO max and YouTube were no sweat.

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6 hours ago, Al Miller said:

On Anthem this week it was honestly pretty good all week. Worst part is the mesh network. You learn the dead zones. The pub on Anthem is the pits. Then right outside at Sorrentos is blazing full speed. Every once in a while your device gets stuck on a weak access point and won't switch to the closer stronger AP unless you turn off, turn on your wifi.  It was pretty good in my cabin although a couple of times it would obviously switch to a weaker AP for no apparent reason. The old TOTO on the wifi would fix it. HBO max and YouTube were no sweat.

Roaming between access points is done at the discretion of the wireless client (each device).   An access point can't hold on to a client, the client decides to remain connected to one AP or to associate to a different AP.  

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On 2/12/2023 at 9:53 AM, WAAAYTOOO said:

It’s been a mixed bag on SY since boarding yesterday.  Room coverage has been pretty poor but out here on the (boardwalk) balcony is excellent 

seconding this on symphony; weird pockets where you just get kicked off/drop service for an extended period of time in certain areas. 

our room coverage is actually decent, but we are mid ship, so i’m wondering if that may help. 

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On 2/12/2023 at 9:53 AM, WAAAYTOOO said:

It’s been a mixed bag on SY since boarding yesterday.  Room coverage has been pretty poor but out here on the (boardwalk) balcony is excellent 

I've had zero issues on Symphony. Only issue for me is the Starlink network location was Mexico City while we were in Mexico and my work VPN doesn't allow me to connect from international locations. We are back on an Atlanta connection now as we are heading back.

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39 minutes ago, AshleyDillo said:

I've had zero issues on Symphony. Only issue for me is the Starlink network location was Mexico City while we were in Mexico and my work VPN doesn't allow me to connect from international locations. We are back on an Atlanta connection now as we are heading back.

Is Symphony's internet still throtled?

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9 hours ago, AshleyDillo said:

I don't know what any of this means.

Screenshot_20230217_032726_Speedtest.thumb.jpg.0b9299b2cb0cd2145b0c4e01df0e8a2a.jpg

21 Mbps download at 3am indicates it probably is throttled, but at a higher rate than the old ~4Mbps.  There is the possibility you were in a noisy or poor connection zone and the wifi or access point is the bottleneck and not any throttle of starlink itself, but I doubt that's the case here.  Upload speed of 1 Mbps is a little disappointing, but I'm assuming they are using 90%+ of the bandwidth (time) for download like a lot of ISPs do to boost the more important* download number.  Ping is a little higher than I expected too as I thought starlink was supposed to be in the 2-digit range due to the low orbit.

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On 2/16/2023 at 9:17 AM, Matt said:

Is Symphony's internet still throtled?

i want to say yes, although i didn’t do a speed test to confirm. 

i noticed consistently around 10pm in our cabin, every night, it would crap out and fail for a few minutes.  we were both streaming (on our separate packages) and i was online shopping a large sale page at the time 😂 after having done my apple watch update and then it just died. 

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The topic of Starlink was brought up at Captains Corner on Ovation on Monday. The story goes that the infrastructure was installed before the ship left Alaska, however it had to be taken out pretty quickly as some of the islands in the South Pacific (Noumea & Vanuatu if I remember right) haven't approved it to be used yet.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Starlink on Wonder was absolutely terrible this past week. Speeds and (perceived) latency were really atrocious and it honestly felt like I was on Mariner of the Seas pre-Starlink at times.

I don't know if this is the result of a throttling on the network level, or an upnetwork change.

I heard from multiple guests onboard the Voom rep said it was an issue with Starlink, but for an entire week? Not so sure.

Very disappointing.

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14 minutes ago, AlmondFarmer said:

What is the birthstone for this constellation? 
I think my daughter is a StarLink. 

The Zodiac is pending an update given that Starlink satellites are blocking visibility of the night sky.   The revised Zodiac will include a component based on which Starlink satellites were launched during an individual's birth week and month.  

For example if born the week of August 7 then your Starlink Zodiac sign is L9 or Launch 9.

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