Royal Caribbean to use SpaceX's Starlink to provide internet onboard their fleet
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Starlink is fantastic in some ways, but I think they've massively oversold it, and I'm not sure they'll ever catch up as they're recruiting people faster than they're adding satellites. I've now used it all around the country, and it seems particularly bad on the US east coast.
I worry that this push to sell to more-lucrative customers at sea is just going to make the service even worse for nobodies like me.
I used Starlink in rural Australia where the alternative was non-fuctional 3G tethering and it was very fast without a single dropout in many days. Friends in off-grid cabins in Western Canada have the same experience.
International service. Maybe they are aiming to be a global one, but not there yet. Starlink is not available anywhere in Africa nor Asia, two of the most populous continents in the world, together accounting for more than 50% of the total population.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124283/internet-penetra...
The bottleneck is the bandwidth/users a single satellite can serve at any given time, as a single satellite serves users below where it is at that point in the sky. So when satellites start orbiting over the ocean or remote/uninhabited locations, they are sitting idle.
I would think that latitude distance is irrelevant and longitude distance is everything.
A ship going across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans would have the satelites all to themselves. A ship sailing ports in the Caribbean would be in a very congested region.
Airplanes fly at a very high elevation which should allow them to access satellites covering less dense cells.
Why would you think that? There's nothing special about north south directions versus east west directions.
> A ship sailing ports in the Caribbean would be in a very congested region.
Congested by what exactly? Most of the countries in the Caribbean don't have Starlink.
It's definitely a nice option but it's hard to rely on. I certainly wouldn't want to work remotely using it as my main connection for any length of time.
It really is pretty much Starlink or nothing in many rural locations in the US.
I was an early-ish adopter, so I have the first gen hardware. I think that may make some difference.
Since it's the middle of the ocean, you're competing with nobody else (besides, maybe, large ships that also pay for Starlink)
I've been tempted to try RV Starlink as an alternative but I don't think having my livelihood reliant on 'Elon Musk might think I'm taking the piss and cut off my internet' is a great idea. Realistically 4G and 5G coverage is good enough where I'm intending to go that it's not a huge issue.
To save others the googling: $5000/mo for Starlink Maritime, equipment cost $10000.
The biggest obstacle for future growth is launch capacity, which hopefully Starship will address. If Starship doesn't fly in time, Starlink is toast
This would be incorrect. If it has proper line of sight this does not occur. You're experiencing some other problem that most people do not experience.
> Starlink is fantastic in some ways, but I think they've massively oversold it, and I'm not sure they'll ever catch up as they're recruiting people faster than they're adding satellites.
This isn't a problem over the ocean as there's no one out there. It will be extremely high speeds in such places.
> I worry that this push to sell to more-lucrative customers at sea is just going to make the service even worse for nobodies like me.
It can't make service worse on land because the systems are disjoint. Speeds in one cell do not affect speeds in another cell.
Each ship can then split the bandwidth up into nice rentable subsets and charge an arm and a leg to guests so they can watch YouTube.
This seems quite high to me. $20/day for a full working day of access, fine. But for checking my email once a day while on holiday to see if anything urgent has come in? That's excessive!
My point being that having relatively cheap and reliable internet on a cruise ship is a big pro even if your cruise is in Med. I'm sure that absolutely every cruise line is trying to get starlink terminals onboard as soon as possible.
Saving $20 to not check your email and find out what breaks when you're unavailable is a win win.
Free all day every day to check to see if something urgent has come in… $200 an hour to use VPN / Web to fix that something urgent.
This is how I managed to break the cycle of checking work things on my latest holiday. Was I actually going to do anything about ‘something urgent’ there and then? No? Well don’t bother checking.
Nothing bad happened.
Plenty of people have reasons to check email that are not about work, and where they could reasonably need to be contactable. It's quite a privilege in many ways to be able to fully disconnect.
My general point here is, something, anything, urgent has come up. What're you gonna do? Swim to shore? I can think of the convenience of forgetting to pay a bill and then doing it online - in which case it's up to you to figure if whatever internet fee you pay would save you on potential late fees.
Seems onerous to me when considering that it's shared with x other people. But I also don't know anything about cruise ship internet economics.
Let me just lay down and forget the world for an hour and leave in bliss please.
I said I would feel more energised keeping the money in my pocket.
I feel like you could though, if you wanted, have an offline vacation anywhere. I know people who go camping and turn their phones off the entire time until they return.
I mean, you can find people who share your convictions.
Similar to how you can’t just stay off social media to avoid the influence of social media. The entire world has changed, and people behave differently because they are on social media. And their behavior affects you and the ambiance of places you go to.
My last friend who still uses a "dumb" phone with no internet has started to struggle over the last few years as more places just require a smartphone. He's increasingly excluded from services.
I have a smartphone, but I use it for text messaging, calls, navigation, and not much else. Tickets I buy online and print. I've never been to a restaurant that required a phone to see the menu or order, and I'd likely walk out if they did.
The maps/navigation is convenient, but if push came to shove I'd print the directions like I used to do before phone navigation was a thing.
I do not own a printer (30 years old), and neither do any of my siblings. If I want to print something I'd have to do it at work but don't know how to make the work printers work (despite being a software engineer at a company with a "good" printer setup). I travel internationally and don't print anything for that anymore.
> I've never been to a restaurant that required a phone to see the menu
I've never been to a place with a web menu and tried to get a physical menu.
> if push came to shove I'd print the directions
That's true if you know where you're going ahead of time, but if you're out and decide you now need directions to a coffee shop, ATM, public toilet, pharmacy, etc, you often need to look them up. You can ask for directions, but only if you speak the language, can find someone who knows, etc.
I have a vague bad feeling about all of this change, but I can't really justify it. These are the ways things are going and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing in general, although there are negatives to it.
I certainly don't obsessively print things but I don't work in an office and I probably want to print at least a few pages in a given week.
If push came to shove, I'd send smoke signals to my friend across town when I want to invite them to a party.
In the sense that you haven't laid out a clear boundary to the "other people". You don't have to go on a cruise ship to get away from email etc. You just say, "I'm offline from x to y".
I suspect you are not comfortable actually telling the other people this - I'm not sure if it's employer, customer, or family. In all cases though the right solution is to be clear, and give advance notice. There will likely be some push-back (especially given your past behaviour) but be firm.
Feel free to browse all you like. Feel free to post pics to Instagram. But resist the urge to answer emails or messages. Let that wait.
Ultimately people will treat your boundaries based on how _you_ treat your boundaries. It's a you problem first, not a them problem.
Seriously. Set boundaries. Using "no access" as an excuse implies that if you're reachable you're on the hook to serve other people's desires at all times. People need to know that there are times in your life that are reserved for you only, and some people have a problem with that, so you have to tell them yourself in no uncertain terms.
https://www.alaska.org/tours https://you.com/search?q=alaska+hiking+trails
SpaceX also just partnered with TMobile to bring direct-to-phone satellite internet. It'll probably take a while to happen, and the announced specs are pretty limited, but it's basically going to be everywhere.
I am very, very, sick of this purely self aggrandizing "tragedy."
As we enter the era of increased satellite connectivity, it makes sense that some cruises would offer no Internet access to passengers as a perk. That would have nothing to do with the crew having access.
Or shocker: you could just leave your phone at home when you go on your trip.
JFC why do people have to magnify this into something when it's literally nothing?
Edit: comment above made a stealth edit where my comment now appears disjoint. I'll leave my comment as is other than this warning.
It's not identical because the rest of the people surrounding you aren't in a low-internet or no-internet bubble.
I love the internet. I also like to unplug, and it's really annoying to unplug and then have a few people not bought into the idea around you.
Like seriously, there is no problem here, no tragedy.
When I hear what you're saying it's roughly equivalent to "I wish I could go out to bars and talk to people who don't have TV" about 2 decades ago. It's preposterous to assert this is some big deal, or that you don't have your own agency to create an unplugged environment with like minded people if you like.
The person you lambasted had said this:
> it makes sense that some cruises would offer no Internet access to passengers as a perk
I saw the comment in that minute before you responded-- this was in it. Further, there were cousin comments articulating the same view.
You're not being very kind.
> When I hear what you're saying it's roughly equivalent to "I wish I could go out to bars and talk to people who don't have TV" about 2 decades ago.
Here it's more like "I wish I could go to a bar somewhere near me without a TV blaring".
You want to be disconnected from the internet? Great, more power to you. You want those around you to also be disconnected from the internet? In the most sincere way possible, fuck you.
If you can't fight the urge to bust out an internet client upon seeing someone else mess with one, that's a You problem and specifically a lack of self-discipline.
Unless you literally own the cruise ship and you are literally the law onboard as captain/owner of the ship, nobody has to accomodate your lack of self-discipline.
Of course, if you want help resolving your lack of self-discipline that's a different story, and I'm sure many folks would be happy to give you advice on that front.
vs. What we're replying to:
> As we enter the era of increased satellite connectivity, it makes sense that some cruises would offer no Internet access to passengers as a perk. That would have nothing to do with the crew having access.
And again, it's not my lack of non-discipline: it's me enjoying being in places where the other people I'm with are disconnected. I value disconnected experiences; if a quarter of people around me are nose-down in a phone, that devalues the experience for me a fair bit. There are likely decent markets for disconnected experiences.
The post I replied to (you) reads, in part, as follows: "I also like to unplug, and it's really annoying to unplug and then have a few people not bought into the idea around you."
Absolutely, find cruise ships without internet connection if you're that deep into that sort of thing. Nobody's stopping you, nor is anyone stopping cruise lines from not providing internet.
What I'm saying is: You don't get to just go on some cruise ship and then complain people around you don't act exactly like you. That is absurd.
I don't think anyone is doing that (straw man)-- which is part of why your reaction seems so over the top to me. At worst, people are bemoaning the loss of one more low-network space; which then morphed into a discussion of why a deliberate low-network space might be considered worthwhile beyond the personal choice of not using one's phone.
And then you started putting words in my mouth about me not being able to refrain from using my phone.
Also, it's not an issue of self discipline when social norms dictate that everyone around me is using their phones, and expecting me to do so to interact with them. On a cruise ship there used to be no such expectation. No boss expecting me to be aware of new emails, no friends expecting me to respond to their Facebook invites if I want to come to their parties, no one at the bar expecting me to follow them on Instagram, and no restaurants asking me to scan their QR code if I want to eat.
I don't know when the last time is you've tried to live for a week without a phone, but its become next to impossible unless you're in a protected environment like a cruise ship or a wilderness retreat.
They'll whinge at you for living in the 20th Century, but your stress levels will be down.
Embrace the fact that no-one is irreplaceable, and train your understudies.
I remember remote-debugging a critical crash from a cruise ship in 1996. (Via fax. It was... an experience :)
(Give me a credit shout-out when you're all famous ;)
If you're looking for a more familiar environment, small-town Montana will probably still suit you: https://getinternet.com/which-states-have-best-worst-interne... https://broadbandnow.com/research/best-states-with-internet-...
Do your due diligence though because "silent" has quite the range.
I love cruises and do it a lot. Never use internet on it, unless it was absolutely necessary.
Worse, my single most important use of the computer I take is the deck plans of the ship I am on, it is invincible the amount of details you can find if you download the right plans. I find all the places onboard that often many cruisers do not know are there.
Regarding travel, Eric Schmidt had an interesting story. I think he spoke on Tim Ferriss's podcast that once he was on a business trip to North Korea with a group of people. Before boarding the plane, he was instructed by homeland security people to not bring in any connected devices, including phones. So everyone in the group went in without smartphones. For the next 2 weeks "everyone in the group became best friends" and they "had so much fun and many interesting conversations." (I'm paraphrasing) But once they return to airport and got their phones back, "we all immediately sunk into our phones and stopped talking to each other."
Maybe your best bet is North Korea? Seriously though, I think more and more people will see the benefit of occasionally entering into an "internet free" zone, by themselves or in groups. Preferably the zone is designed specifically for offline experience, not an augmented one relying on the guest's own "will power" to resist the pressure of internet.
Plan 1 won't encroach on plan 2 yet, unless all you care about is Whatsapp.
Regardless if you are a T-Mobile customer using that deal or not at all, you join the in-plane WiFi AP, it goes to the captive portal, and there you get options like "tmobile customers offer", "single flight pass", and "monthly flight pass". Once you pick your option and get through it, you have internet access. And regardless which option you went with, you get the exact same type of internet connection as everyone else on that flight.
From what I've personally seen, it was done through GoGo Inflight Internet[0] heavy majority of the time.
Also, SpaceX is the cheapest way to get to orbit now so a lot of these companies are probably struggling on the cost front.
which is Q4 2022, and Royal Caribbean implementation is Q1 2023, so that's moot.
Further, Starlink is aiming for Q4 2022, but that’s not guaranteed.
This means that all of the Caribbean is likely covered as well as all of Costal Americas.
They would also see gaps when traveling further offshore to avoid bad weather etc, until global coverage working.
Emergency service - distress, weather, etc. - go through constellations like Iridium. Low bandwidth, high latency.
SpaceX has 3 direct competitors in similar orbits. All 3 have global (ITU) regulatory approvals, but are behind on building and launching things.
It is all about efficiency. You have to build and launch thousands of satellites, and no company other than SpaceX has driven down the cost of those two things enough to make it feasible.
Simple: to provide maximum speed to the end users, you want a large amount of small cells so you can better use the allocated frequency spectrum. However, launches used to be really expensive, so operators had to go for high orbits covering large areas - Iridium, for example, cost 5 billion dollars to build for 77 satellites, meaning a cost per satellite of ~64 million dollars (hardware+launch).
In contrast, SpaceX is at ~250k-500k dollars for the satellite and anything from 30-60 million dollars per launch of 60 satellites, so total cost of ~750k-1.5 million dollars per satellite [2]. That's a whole order of magnitude less cost than Iridium.
And on top of that, SpaceX's lower orbit also means better service quality due to lower latency and better signal quality. Established satcom providers physically cannot compete with that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...
[2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satell...
The reason is that SpaceX only can support so many users in a given region because each satellite has limited bandwidth.
That gets harder at sea...
I guess Royal Caribbean never goes that far from land?
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map....
Near-shore coverage is there because of the nearby ground stations, yes. But per that map they expect to be covering two large bands of open ocean later this year, and the rest next year. Satellite-to-satellite communication will allow users to make use of it without nearby ground stations via multiple in-space hops.
Given that this press release has them deploying Starlink in their cruise ship fleet at the end of Q1 2023, that fits the above map's projections. So Starlink already has a major customer lined up for their upcoming service.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...
Seems like par for the course for most Musk ventures
Some of these comments suggest that having satellite internet onboard a cruise ship is a new thing. It's certainly not.
After some quick googling it looks like the current provider is O3b Networks (now part of SES), using modem equipment manufactured by ST Engineering iDirect.
I somehow doubt that when O3b Networks won that contract in 2013 it made the front page of HN. But now, there's "SpaceX's Starlink" in the title and it sits on #7 on the front page with 130+ comments.
This story for example, of the comments where Musk is first mentioned in a thread, 3 (including the dead one) are anti-Musk, and 1 is neutral (using Musk as shorthand for Musk's businesses), and zero are positive. Nothing rabidly pro-Musk.
So I rather think stories like this are being upvoted because people like hearing about travel, internet and comms, rockets, satellites, and the like. I don't think it's very charitable to think it's only due to some vapid Musk fan club.
How much does spacex spend on marketing?
Just because some people (excluding you) think his products are awesome, doesn't mean he oversold it.
Also, Elon constantly oversells his products every chance he is given - Tesla shows, any interview, I think he managed to do it even when he went on SNL.
It was a dummy payload. Sure the car was more expensive than a block of concrete, but not by much.
Elon claims SpaceX was started because he couldn't inspire people with a martian greenhouse photo. So it is "in character" for him to do inspiring things if possible along the way.
Perhaps that's "significantly more costly than the vast majority of ad campaigns", but only because the vast majority of ad campaigns are not very costly at all (I guess the dominant ad campaign by number is a limited online or local print one for a small business, costing in the low 4 figures). Certainly it wouldn't be significantly more costly than the vast majority of ad campaigns for car manufacturers, though.
I also haven't seen any other car company CEO claiming that the car they sell you will literally pay for itself in 1 year by collecting faires as a robotaxi starting from 2019.
I also haven't seen any other company CEO claiming that their company will give you virtual immortality by uploading your brain into a computer.
Well, I should say for all of these, any other CEO that is not running a scam company.
Musk claims to be worried about the earth becoming uninhabitable and has the goal of starting a colony on Mars to mitigate that risk. Do you think that's just a lie he's telling to somehow get richer? That he doesn't really have that concern or aim? What's the scam here?
Sure he is over-optimistic and hypes is products and over-promises. When it comes to rockets, so does NASA, Boeing, ULA, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, Arianespace... well probably most of them. When it comes to electric or autonomous cars, so does GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, Uber... also probably most of them.
Yes, that aim is impossible for the forseeable future, and for the effort and resources you would spend making a self-sustaining Mars colony, if it's in any way possible, you can definitely make the Earth habitable after any possible disaster that doesn't destroy the whole orbit.
For the others, find me one other example that has so constantly spread such lies.
Also, I'm not saying that SpaceX or Tesla are a scam, they are clearly companies that have achieved huge milestones and are producing and selling real products. I'm just saying that he massively over-promises and over-hypes his products, far beyond what other CEOs of actual companies do.
He does sometimes end up over promising so much that he has run afoul of false advertising laws, or very near - particularly with "full self-driving".
You also are saying they're scams.
> Well, I should say for all of these, any other CEO that is not running a scam company.
And just about all the rocket and self driving and electric car companies and government organizations I listed massively over promised things. Tesla and Space X aren't the worst of the bunch as far as I can see. How are you measuring these over promises compared with others?
I think what this looks like is you just personally hate Musk and are trying to come up with reasons for it that don't sound petty or unreasonable. You don't have to, you're allowed to hate him for whatever reason you like, and you don't have to explain yourself to anybody.
He is saying that his goal is to make humanity multi-planetary, so that it can survive a disaster that may happen to the earth.
This goal is impossible with anything resembling current technology. This is obvious if you think about it even for a little bit. So it's either a lie, or he hasn't thought about it for more than a little bit.
> You also are saying they're scams.
No I'm not. I'll repeat it again: SpaceX and Tesla are serious companies producing worthwhile products that people want. They have both broken ground in areas where no company has broken ground for a long long time, and they have generally left older companies in their spaces in the dust.
This doesn't mean that Musk doesn't try to present them as even more than they actually are, for purposes that I'm sure are part ego boosting, part clever marketing. He often outright lies while doing so, or promises impossible goals in impossible timelines.
Great, that's a cool goal. Especially with so much concern about existential threats to humanity on earth.
> This goal is impossible with anything resembling current technology. This is obvious if you think about it even for a little bit. So it's either a lie, or he hasn't thought about it for more than a little bit.
Or he wants to improve on current technology, like he's been doing.
> No I'm not. I'll repeat it again: SpaceX and Tesla are serious companies producing worthwhile products that people want. They have both broken ground in areas where no company has broken ground for a long long time, and they have generally left older companies in their spaces in the dust.
Okay you backed down on that now, but you did say it before in the part I quoted.
> This doesn't mean that Musk doesn't try to present them as even more than they actually are,
Like all companies including the many competitors I listed.
> for purposes that I'm sure are part ego boosting, part clever marketing. He often outright lies while doing so, or promises impossible goals in impossible timelines.
I still think it's that you hate Musk and are fixating on him. When I asked you to explain why it's a scam for example, you couldn't. So just a bit more thinking through things seems to help bring a bit more clarity and perspective.
I mean you're asking about other companies and CEOs, I can't understand it you must be willfully looking the other way. The CEO of BP has has branded himself a visionary leader who is fighting climate change, for example. And that kind of bullshit is common among petroleum corporations, that was just the first example I searched for.
So, it's just all pretty rich to hear you talking about how other CEOs are great and don't do all these terrible things you imagine Musk does. I mean, there are perfectly good reasons to hate Musk, but when you start trying to say other CEOs are much better by comparison and that's your justification for it, I think that demonstrates it's not very rational in this case.
Though there's a distressing culture of nerds who salivate at every brain fart he puts out into the world
You actually make a fairly decent point (FSD being forever "soon" is one example), however in most of the businesses that Elon Musk operates in, delays or outright failures are extremely common (Tesla made electric cars appealing. Basically was impossible. SpaceX developed rockets in a "few years". Basically unheard of since Apollo-era. And so on).
So I would probably lean on the side of "give the dude some slack"?