SpaceX Starlink Cruise Ship Internet Fab Or Fail

23 comments

1. How is SpaceX Starlink when cruising on the largest cruise ship on the planet?

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2. Enjoy your trip.

3. You should see if you can find the on board it guy. He might be able to run some speed tests on a hard line. I would not be surprised if the Wi-Fi is what is causing your bad speeds and there also maybe some QoS rules which are slowing things down. But I would find that it guy he will be able to tell you a lot more but you may have to say some anonymous source.

4. Love the channel. Washington State here and yes my dish points more westerly now as discussed in a previous vid. Not about the ship but figured this was a great channel to post this question…My dish seems to reboot every night around 3am and was wondering if this a normal thing that you or others are experiencing? It's only down for a few mins and the router stays on (it's just the actual dish itself) just no internet. Of course this means everyday my system has to rescan for obstructions which takes up to 12 hours🤬 only to reboot again the next night. Curious what others have noticed, thanks

5. J… In regards to the intermittency/performance issues, … Find the "Concierge", … Ask him to get in touch with the "Ships" .. "IT Manager"…. and, … ask him, … " Have you tried Turning it off, and, then, back on again" …… 🤣🤣🤣🤣…….

6. The issue is continuing to add antennas all in the same spot beam from the satellite will just have diminishing returns. You can only support so much BW on that particular spot beam and once it reaches saturation more dishes won't help. This is the reason that they limit the number of people in a particular location. Keep in mind that each cell is about 15 miles in diameter. In that cell the max bandwidth is approx 840Mbps max. If the sat has to service three cells hopping, then that would reduce the max per cell rate to a max of 240 Mbps. As you can see adding many antennas doesn't work any better. If we assume that the account has a max of 350 Mbps per antenna pair, that would be (4 antenna pairs x 350Mbps/per antenna = 1.4Gbps max BW). As you can see it would be impossible to obtain that speed even if it was the only "customer" in that cell. The theoretical max is 840Mbps, but again could be lower if it has to service multiple cells. So if you're close to land or another ship within 15 miles they are going take away form that bandwidth as well. So ever having more than 3 pairs of dishes is actually a waste, but four makes since if they have a malfunction on one of the nodes, they can use it for N+1 backup or during maintenance activities.

   Having 12-14 dishes within 15 miles of each other won't gain anything in total bandwidth for the ship beyond the 840Mbps. Just think 10-15 years ago even 350Mbps would have been unheard of at sea. Many years ago I was paying about $8K per month in vSAT charges for 10Mbps service down and 2Mbps up internet and voice services on my 76' yacht. It will be great when they actually get global coverage as that will be a game changer. We had a 24" dish that had to be three axis stabilized in a dome. Same for TV signals in another 24" dome. With having no moving parts in the phased array that makes it so much more compact.

   Keep up the good work sir and enjoy vacation. Thanks for the updates! 👍😁

7. Wow, you got a great gig.

   That cruise line is much more economy than some other cruise lines. They really don't care or need to care about customer internet. These are people on vacation to a private island, they ain't staying abord. and surfing the web. If Carnival can lower its internet costs by using Starlink, it makes sense.

   For carribean cruises why bother?

8. So what is weird is I am in SW Arizona near Quartzsite which is a haven for snow birds that typically grows from 3500 people to near a million people and I bet there are a gazillion starlinks there, the park where I am in also has 15 antennas I know of, but anyway it's like prime time for rv'ers and I am getting 53 down and 10.6 up 44 ms with a rv unit. My pop is Los Angeles which is about 250 miles from here

9. I'm in North Central Florida in Ocala and I have checked the mileage for the POP in Miami and Georgia and the difference for me is not to bad for my dish to point to the POP in GA. Both locations are over 300 miles from my location J. I can't complain about my speeds even though I used to get speeds of 50 to 70 Mbps during peak hours and now I am only getting 25 to 26 Mbps lately. I along with you agree would think that a ship (not a boat) that large would have better internet than what you showed on the speed test. Thanks J and very informative.

10. Cool and very interesting video! I was wondering if the issue could have to do with how signals from several antennas (or accounts) are networked throughout the ship? Anyway, enjoying your cruise videos, just as I have all your content. I’ll be following closely as we are cruising the fjords of Norway in the Spring.

11. Just throwing out a theory, but this ship might have the newer enterprise grade antennas with more throughput, or more likely; This cruise company thinks this amount of antennas is adequate for their needs (Kinda like how hotel wifi is so bad at every hotel I've ever stayed at) whereas the other ship you've seen felt it was more important to prioritize their internet access. Still, 3 mb down isn't bad at all if you're just watching 1080p content. That's more than enough for most people.

12. 5-10mpbs @70ms ping is actually better than 10-20mpbs @600ms ping. This is because data packets will be sent faster, rather than more data being sent slower. That idle ping speed is the delay PER PACKET, not an overall data transmission. So technically, even though the speed is lower, the internet is even faster. And like you said, there's a lot of people for not a whole lot of bandwidth, because there's another royal carribean ship with 11 antennas rather than 8 which also has a lot less people.

    P.S, keep in mind that starlink will only get better with time, it could be that the 1 satellite or maybe 2 passing overhead can't handle the amount of data being sent by a possible 5000 people at one time. The more gen 2 sats, and more antennas on ships WILL provide better speeds eventually. I'd say try this test again in 8-12 months.

13. I suspect the ship's routers are providing individual bandwidth of the Internet speeds. With 8 antennas that are capable of 100-250 mbs each and up to 5000 people I can believe 2-10 mbs is a reasonable down speed. Then we have the ship's command that most likely has their private high-speed channels. There could be more antennas distributed at different points of the ship. I would ask the captain or one of the communication officers about this to get the real story of the ship's Internet technology.

14. That open area looks like the Babylon 5 Zocalo! Watch out for the Narns – they are generally in a foul temper.

    Take care and God Bless.

15. Not sure if you have cruised before, but the last time I cruised the internet was absolute CRAP, would have killed for a 3 meg connection. It’s all in the perspective.

16. Starlink uses the same frequencies as the sats in geostationary orbit services. To avoid interference with other services they aim to the north so their signals from your antenna and their ground stations are not aimed at the the geosats.

17. Maybe there are more antennas on the aft end of the ship. Can you connect to the Dishy?

18. I just took a cruise on Carnival Celebration and the Wi-Fi was great. The best in all the cruise i took.

19. Those 5-10 sec dropouts are similar to our slightly obstructed dish.
    I wonder if ship stuff is blocking them?!

20. Correct me if I am wrong. It looks like the Satellites first connect to a "gateway". This would be the ground location that has a satellite dish. It then sends the data to the Pop in Atlanta. After that it connects to the "interwebs".

    So for me it travels: My dish (Near Jacksonville) – closest passing satellite – Gateway (either De Lion Springs FL or Gaffney SC, and sometimes Baxley GA or rarely Norcross GA) – Then to The Pop in Atlanta GA.

    How far the gateway is from the POP should heavily affect ping. The satellite connects to the closest gateway. Which is good. But then gateway to POP is across the ground. I believe that having the POP in Atlanta has more to do with connecting to the interwebs at large and Atlanta is a very central location for this. I would also venture to guess that there is a lot of internet infrastructure there just because of it's central location.

    This would mean that the POP in Atlanta GA should give the best overall browsing experience. That is unless you are only connecting to services local to Florida. If you connect to Miami then all your data traffic has to travel through or to GA anyhow. Something to think about.

21. You seen more relaxed that normal must be the sea air 🙂

22. Supplemental note: I have no idea how many Dishys are on Celebrity Beyond. I have not seen a one. If I find out, I will post and update. The other ships I could see because of our parking position. Bill

23. I am presently on RCL's Celebrity Beyond . We have StarLink and I have the best unlimited package they offer – $35/day. The ship’s capacity is 3,260 and there are actually around 2,800 on the ship this week. Last week we had only 2,074 quest on the ship and the internet speeds were noticeably better. I am in St Thomas today, Thursday, Jan 26. My internet speeds have been highly variable, but no slower than 27 Megs down and 4 megs up – clearly much better than you have experienced. Typically I am getting THIS WEEK, 37 to 60 Megs down. Last week was typically 60 to 85 Megs down. The highest has been around 130 Megs down. I have only experienced 3 or 4 very short drops in the past 10 days. WiFi Calling has been GOOD, no serious problems though I did have a poor voice connection once for about 1 minute, but it never dropped the call. DirecTV is also working well. My VPN (Private Internet Access – PIA) works great and has allowed me access to a few websites the ship has blocked. RCL Oasis is parked next to us. I’ve counted 12 Dishys on it. We also saw RCL Voyager of the Seas and counted about 8 Dishys in 2 different locations – over the Bridge and in the back of the ship. So what you counted in a single location may NOT be all of them. Noting the difference in speeds this week, and with a much higher ship guest capacity, I believe they may not be getting enough Dishys to serve everyone with true HIGH SPEED internet. What is worse, they are advertising in multiple locations that they are using StarLink for Internet which will give first time users with service like yours a very bad experience and taste for StarLink !!!! StarLink should REQUIRE they have a minimum number of Dishys to service the maximum capacity of the ship. Doing otherwise risks poor service for all and a bad reputation to would be land based customers. FYI, I use StarLink at home in Western NC (Franklin, NC). My typical speeds there are between 60 and 85 megs down and generally no worse that 27 Megs down.

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