Jump to content

Allure - Starlink Confirmed


Recommended Posts

2 hours ago, Matt said:

Royal throttles the speed, but the latency is wonderful!

That's terrible throttling it like that. My guess would be that once it's up and running on all of the ships that a new tier will be introduced with faster speeds, and of course a higher price to go along with it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hate to say I told you so, but I warned of this many times before.  Not aimed at any poster here, but switching satellite providers while retaining the outdated and archaic practice of throttling users will yield very little difference in the user experience.  

The satellite provider hasn't been the problem all along.  Royal has been.  This throttling on some ships with Starlink but not on other ships with Starlink is an experiment is trying to determine what they can get away with while looking to introduce new packages at higher rates that provide better speeds.  

For all those that were excited about the Starlink coming to Royal news - Ha Ha!  Jokes on you!   

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If it were not for the fact that I have a business, my office manager emails when something needs to be addressed, the internet would not be all that important. I get the need for revenue but this is akin to what they charge for popcorn at the movie theater. Well, actually I am better with the theater given their limited avenues for making money.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Having used it for a little under a day, I can say without a doubt its faster than the old stuff which I used in 2019. While browsing reddit I barely notice a difference then when at home on wifi. I won't be streaming Netflix or downloading large files on it but don't need to.

My wife and I got it through the key, for only $17.99, each, and totally worth it.

Edited by uberrainman
Misspelled word
Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, twangster said:

I hate to say I told you so, but I warned of this many times before.  Not aimed at any poster here, but switching satellite providers while retaining the outdated and archaic practice of throttling users will yield very little difference in the user experience.  

The satellite provider hasn't been the problem all along.  Royal has been.  This throttling on some ships with Starlink but not on other ships with Starlink is an experiment is trying to determine what they can get away with while looking to introduce new packages at higher rates that provide better speeds.  

For all those that were excited about the Starlink coming to Royal news - Ha Ha!  Jokes on you!   

Any explanation why internet was horrible for me on Indy in July and wonderful last week? Same itinerary.  Biggest difference was in my cabin (they were only 4 cabins apart). Barely worked in July, could stream video flawlessly this time. Performed better all over the ship and on Cococay as well.

Serious question, not being snarky, just curious.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, twangster said:

The satellite provider hasn't been the problem all along.  Royal has been. 

To some degree I agree, but go on Mariner and then Oasis (pre-starlink) and tell me that's still not the satellite provider. Mariner's internet must be run off an old Soviet satellite from the space station Mir.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, OCSC Mike said:

Any explanation why internet was horrible for me on Indy in July and wonderful last week? Same itinerary.  Biggest difference was in my cabin (they were only 4 cabins apart). Barely worked in July, could stream video flawlessly this time. Performed better all over the ship and on Cococay as well.

Serious question, not being snarky, just curious.

There are so many variables with WiFi and satellite internet.  

On one cruise you may be one of a few people using the closest access point.  On another cruise there may be six families with kids all watching youtube videos all day long.  You don't see those people in their cabin but all that WiFi traffic can make your access point experience slow.  The RF spectrum used by WiFi is a shared medium so more users doing more stuff equates to a lesser experience.  All you know is on this cruise on that date it seemed slow.

In some cases the user devices in use can cause an access point to fall back to lower rates as a common denominator.  You may have a kicka$$ device but if the cabin next to you is using an iPhone 6 and another cabin has an even older device sometimes that access point has to dumb it down to accommodate those older devices.  Same ship a week later with different guests and it doesn't seem to be as slow.  

WiFi coverage on ships will remain to be problematic due to all the metal involved.  A company I worked for previously was approached by another cruise line to work on WiFi coverage in their engine rooms.  WiFi can also be used for tracking objects with tags such as RFID devices.  They wanted to track workers and know how long they were spending at different work areas within the engine room.  The problem is the engine room (and for several decks near) is an extremely busy RF radio spectrum environment.  The amount of interference thrown off massive engines and generators makes it really tough to do WiFi reliably.  A lot of this RF noise permeates throughout the ship.  Sometimes when I take pictures the generator interference can cause ripples in my photos at some shutter speeds.

All of the metal around a cabin makes it a faraday cage.  Putting access point in hallways creates poor WiFi signal quality inside cabins.  If your cabin is close to an access point you may be okay especially at the capped lower rates offered on Voom (3Mbs is pretty low).  The further you are from an access point means you connect at lower physical rates that could be closer to 1Mbps or even lower through metal doors.  Newer ships have access points in the cabin.  Edge class do this as does Wonder.  Wonder is the only Royal ship with in-cabin access points.  Wonder uses Aruba 303H access points in the cabins.  These are decent access points that cap at just under 900 Mbps connection rates in theory. 

Upgrading hallway access points can provide some user experience gains but not typically in a dramatic fashion on a ship.  Most of the benefits of newer access point technology user higher frequencies that don't penetrate all metal cabins very well so users will often need to use the older and slower 2.4Ghz band in cabins and that technology isn't changing dramatically as the advancement in WiFi is mostly in the 5 and 6 Ghz bands. 

It's not practical to recable a ship to put access points in cabins.  New ships builds can do this, retrofitting and running new cabling into each cabin is a massive undertaking just like adding more power outlets into older ship cabins isn't practical.  

Poor weather around the ship and/or poor weather hundreds of miles away where the signal comes down from the satellite and back to earth can impact user experience.  A thunderstorm where the signal comes down can impact user experience on a ship thousands of miles away under sunny skies with not a cloud in sight. People never think about a storm back on land impacting their experience, they just know it sucks at that moment.  Sometimes guests don't think about it raining outside as they sit in the pub or in a theater.  They just know Voom is gloom at that moment.

O3b used to rock on ships like Indy pre-shutdown.   During the shutdown they lowered their commitment and total throughput to save money.  With a hundred employees on board they didn't need bandwidth for 4,000 people during the shutdown.  Once cruising restarted I'm pretty sure they didn't upgrade their satellite throughput to old levels, they desperately needed to save money so they oversubscribed their ship bandwidth in ways they never did pre-shutdown.

Starlink costs a lot less than O3b.  An estimated 70% less.  Starlink can't achieve the speeds that O3b can provide but if Royal isn't subscribing to higher levels of O3b speeds Starlink appears to be faster.

Then there is the matter of older ships that never got O3b.  Pre-shutdown the old satellite tech worked okay but suffered from really high latency.  Since the restart they haven't upgraded the ship throughput to old levels so now not only is latency very high but they are way oversubscribed in terms of total bandwidth to the ship.   Starlink should help these ships more dramatically.

At the same time society has moved forward since 2020.  More people have gigabit internet at home.  More devices use "the cloud" for more stuff.  Meanwhile over the last two years ship technology hasn't moved forward.  The old 3Mbps per user caps are retained on some ships including some ships that have been updated to use Starlink.  I don't know why some ships like Freedom and Liberty aren't imposing the 3 Mbps per user cap that Indy does with Starlink.  If I know Royal it's probably because they haven't figured out how to impose the per user cap on these ships, it may have been performed by the satellite provider rather than on the ship in the WiFi controller.  Not all Royal ships are the same, some use Aruba, some user Cisco for wireless.  Some ships may use some other technology.

Even if they invested $10M to update ships to the latest WiFi infrastructure the all metal environments means they'll see marginal improvements.   Modern access points can typically handle more users connected simultaneously but more users connected means a busier RF spectrum and being a shared medium that can make for a lesser user experience depending on the devices involved.

There are use cases that don't need and won't see very many benefits from deploying the latest technology.  WiFi coverage at surface mines for example, or WiFi coverage in manufacturing environments may not see significant improvements by deploying the newest technology.  Cruise ships partially fall into this category given the metal floors, walls and ceilings.   

I could go on and on.  There are many factors in play.  Put it all together and the experience can differ one week to the next, one ship to the next.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the update. We get on Allure next month and were wondering as I typically work from the ship early mornings saving vacation time. Used it on Liberty last week and it was SOOO much better than the old Voom. Not the fastest but never had a problem. Before Starlink I always had an issue with my Teams conference calls and linking into my servers in the office.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/29/2022 at 9:04 PM, twangster said:

I hate to say I told you so, but I warned of this many times before.  Not aimed at any poster here, but switching satellite providers while retaining the outdated and archaic practice of throttling users will yield very little difference in the user experience.  

The satellite provider hasn't been the problem all along.  Royal has been.  This throttling on some ships with Starlink but not on other ships with Starlink is an experiment is trying to determine what they can get away with while looking to introduce new packages at higher rates that provide better speeds.  

For all those that were excited about the Starlink coming to Royal news - Ha Ha!  Jokes on you!   

Have to disagree with this - throttling is not the only thing that impacts performance, latency (ping) is a huge factor with regards to quality of service. We also don't know the total throughput available to RC on O3b, but it's certainly going to be less than what Starlink provides (100Mbps+)

RC certainly isn't throttling or introducing additional latency on their connections, so even 3Mbps at 60ms latency is going to be a better product than 3Mbps at 500ms+ on O3b. Plus, after testing, RC has the option of opening up the throttle a bit on their profiles (probably with a Surf&Stream+ package for additional $?), something they couldn't do on O3b. 

I'd rather have 1Mbps on 60ms than 10Mbps on 600ms anyday. 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, MattG said:

Have to disagree with this - throttling is not the only thing that impacts performance, latency (ping) is a huge factor with regards to quality of service. We also don't know the total throughput available to RC on O3b, but it's certainly going to be less than what Starlink provides (100Mbps+)

RC certainly isn't throttling or introducing additional latency on their connections, so even 3Mbps at 60ms latency is going to be a better product than 3Mbps at 500ms+ on O3b. Plus, after testing, RC has the option of opening up the throttle a bit on their profiles (probably with a Surf&Stream+ package for additional $?), something they couldn't do on O3b. 

I'd rather have 1Mbps on 60ms than 10Mbps on 600ms anyday. 

 

 

O3b has demonstrated over 1.5 Gbps to a ship over 3 years ago.  Granted few ships subscribe to that throughput but the capability is there.  Starlink maxs out at 350 Mbps for maritime use cases.  

O3b is typically 230ms.

VSAT on the older ships is over 600ms.  

So far Royal has not upgraded any VSAT ships.  They've only updated O3b ships - so far.  

Latency is very important there is no doubt about that, but latency does not equate to throughput.  3 Mbps at 230 ms (O3b) vs. 3 Mbps at 60-100ms (Starlink) is not going to yield a massive improvement to the user experience.  It's not just about latency.  

The fact that Royal never upgraded older ships to O3b tells a lot.  They don't care about the user experience.  They were fine keeping most of the fleet on VSAT service. 

Princess upgraded their whole fleet old and new to O3b prior to the shutdown AND Princess doesn't throttle users to 3Mbps.  It's not unusual to get 80 to 100Mbps on Princess which is far superior to 3Mbps on Royal even if Royal will have 150 ms lower latency on Starlink. 

I'd rather have 80 Mbps at 230 ms than 3 Mbps at 80ms.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, MattG said:

Have to disagree with this - throttling is not the only thing that impacts performance, latency (ping) is a huge factor with regards to quality of service. We also don't know the total throughput available to RC on O3b, but it's certainly going to be less than what Starlink provides (100Mbps+)

RC certainly isn't throttling or introducing additional latency on their connections, so even 3Mbps at 60ms latency is going to be a better product than 3Mbps at 500ms+ on O3b. Plus, after testing, RC has the option of opening up the throttle a bit on their profiles (probably with a Surf&Stream+ package for additional $?), something they couldn't do on O3b. 

I'd rather have 1Mbps on 60ms than 10Mbps on 600ms anyday. 

 

 

Of course Royal is throttling. There is no question about it.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, twangster said:

Latency is very important there is no doubt about that, but latency does not equate to throughput.  3 Mbps at 230 ms (O3b) vs. 3 Mbps at 60-100ms (Starlink) is not going to yield a massive improvement to the user experience.  It's not just about latency. 

I agree latency is not that important for most consumer uses, and I would rather have the throughput there.  However it does become important for most "business" use cases like VPN.  Most VPNs are very finicky with latency and can become unusable even when most other consumer uses (like streaming) work just fine.  I would love to work from the ship to be able to take even more cruises each year, but I know my business VPN connection wouldn't be able to handle the current latency (not to mention all the other satellite interruptions you've pointed out previously).  Personally I don't need a lot of throughput but I do need a stable connection for business, so I'm tempted to at least try it out now with the lower starlink latency just to see if it's viable in the future.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, billdauterive said:

I agree latency is not that important for most consumer uses, and I would rather have the throughput there.  However it does become important for most "business" use cases like VPN.  Most VPNs are very finicky with latency and can become unusable even when most other consumer uses (like streaming) work just fine.  I would love to work from the ship to be able to take even more cruises each year, but I know my business VPN connection wouldn't be able to handle the current latency (not to mention all the other satellite interruptions you've pointed out previously).  Personally I don't need a lot of throughput but I do need a stable connection for business, so I'm tempted to at least try it out now with the lower starlink latency just to see if it's viable in the future.

Most corporate based VPN are not finicky with high latency.  Most consumer type VPN services are sensitive to the traffic shaping often applied with some satellite service providers.    

I've never had issue using corporate VPN over VSAT on the older ships.  Cisco, Fortinet and Juniper corporate VPN have worked fine for me for years on all Royal ships even at 800ms.

For many years on the road to pinnacle I worked remotely from 22 ships of the 26 ships in the fleet pre-shutdown.  Most of those ships didn't have O3b so they were using the older and relatively cheap VSAT service that Royal loves because it was cheaper.  I'm talking Empress, Adventure, Grandeur, Vision, Mariner, Radiance, Explorer, Navigator, Serenade, Brilliance, etc.  All of those older ships that never were upgraded to O3b - I've used VPN on all them but I'm talking corporate grade VPN, not some consumer VPN service.  I'm also talking about many different clients of mine where I connected to their corporate VPN gateways to work with them.

If your corporate IT department implemented a VPN solution that was intolerant to high latent environments that was something they did and something they could overcome by modifying the configuration while still retaining modern encryption protocols.

Don't confuse what is possible over older satellite technology with what Royal has done to ships since the restart.  Namely they have so severely oversubscribed their connections that you can't even load a basic webpage at times.  If you can't load a simple webpage VPN isn't going to connect.  That isn't due to latency, that is due to no basic connectivity. 

We never used to see 0.3Mbps from any Royal ships before the pandemic.  Now it is common.  Voom is gloom these days because Royal has made it so, either because they are behind on their payments to the providers or they have made the intentional decision to make it so bad.

Fun fact - Celebrity only uses VSAT and never upgraded any ship to O3b.  VPN worked on Celebrity too, prior to the shutdown.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, twangster said:

Most corporate based VPN are not finicky with high latency.  Most consumer type VPN services are sensitive to the traffic shaping often applied with some satellite service providers.

Agreed.  I was trying to simplify my scenario some for a wider audience.  My personal use case involves using ssh connections over a corporate vpn which is geolocated on the other side of the country from the actual servers I'm hitting (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) which is the true fragile piece with the latency.  Also possible the latency is a red herring in my case...

So Starlink might not solve my particular issue, but I'm curious to see for certain if the improved latency does since it approaches that of ground connections.  It would at least allow me to rule it out as the true root cause.

 

7 hours ago, twangster said:

We never used to see 0.3Mbps from any Royal ships before the pandemic.  Now it is common.  Voom is gloom these days because Royal has made it so, either because they are behind on their payments to the providers or they have made the intentional decision to make it so bad..

Definitely.  It's shocking how bad it's gotten, especially during reduced passenger capacity early in the restart.  I didn't get screenshots at the time but a lot of my tests during a March cruise were coming in under 1000 bps.  Not Mbps or Kbps, bps.  My first dial up modem was faster.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/30/2022 at 9:41 AM, Matt said:

To some degree I agree, but go on Mariner and then Oasis (pre-starlink) and tell me that's still not the satellite provider. Mariner's internet must be run off an old Soviet satellite from the space station Mir.

No it runs off of dail-up, but those long cords are hard to find now a days

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/29/2022 at 3:55 PM, USFFrank said:

That's terrible throttling it like that. My guess would be that once it's up and running on all of the ships that a new tier will be introduced with faster speeds, and of course a higher price to go along with it.

If they would offer a faster "business / media tier", I would be all over it if it allowed me to work from the cruise ship.  I work remotely as it is but require high speed internet to be able to work -- a lot more than simple video conferencing or file sharing.  I have a lot of Casino Comp offers I have turned down because I just don't have enough vacation time to use them.  I would not mind if some of my "vacations" turned into "working from exotic locations" if it allowed me more time at sea.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/29/2022 at 4:55 PM, USFFrank said:

That's terrible throttling it like that. My guess would be that once it's up and running on all of the ships that a new tier will be introduced with faster speeds, and of course a higher price to go along with it.

They must make most of the corporate profits.  According to Starlink website their maritime package is $5000 per month unlimited data, 350 mbps service (thats a limitation of the service), plus installation of 2 terminals at a fixed cost of $10k.

That boils down to about $166 a day expense for an entire ship that collects estimated $25 x 2000 pax = $50k in revenue daily LOL. 

I keep thinking there must be more to it......?  But that's what they sales materials say.
 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, CleGuy said:

They must make most of the corporate profits.  According to Starlink website their maritime package is $5000 per month unlimited data, 350 mbps service (thats a limitation of the service), plus installation of 2 terminals at a fixed cost of $10k.

That boils down to about $166 a day expense for an entire ship that collects estimated $25 x 2000 pax = $50k in revenue daily LOL. 

I keep thinking there must be more to it......?  But that's what they sales materials say.
 

Not every business plan is posted on Starlink's website.  I've been seeing 8 to 10 starlink antennas on Royal ships.  That doesn't line up with the consumer maritime service a personal yacht owner buys from the website.  In fact the public website map suggests Starlink has no maritime service where Royal ships with Starlink are sailing right now

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...