I was watching some cruise crew videos, and it turns out their biggest expense is internet. I'm curious why they don’t just install Starlink to cut costs and maybe sell to guests some "piracy" internet?
"A Navy officer is demoted after sneaking a satellite dish onto a warship to get the internet"
https://apnews.com/article/navy-illegal-wireless-internet-53...
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy...
---The Starlink dish wasn’t discovered until a civilian technician, installing a Starshield satellite communications system, noted the device and reported it to a senior crew member.
AFAICT, all the airlines rolling out Starlink have made it free on their flights. Which implies cooperation from Starlink -- either Starlink has made "free" a condition of their service, or they've just priced it cheap enough to make free a reasonable option for airlines.
There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced significantly higher than on airlines. So either the cruise lines or Starlink are gouging. Or both. Probably both.
Cruise ships are getting towards the 10k person mark.
One cruise ship will be substantially more load on the local satellites and ground station than a plane will.
The price difference is just based on what the market will bear. Trapped on a cruise for a week, you are much more desperate for Internet. Plus you've paid a lot more for the trip and the fee doesn't feel so large compared to all the other upsells. The cruise often is the vacation, whereas air travel is just the means to an end.
Which is resolved by charging, a lot, so there's enough bandwidth per active paying person.
Personally I would have at least 2 terminals, a low tier and high tier. I would sell only a limited number of high tier connections, good for the entire trip. Probably included as a perk with first-class cabins. The low tier would be a daily purchase. I mean hotels have done this for ages.
Maybe a dedicated business center with wired (dongle) connection and kiosk PCs, that gets the best bandwidth of all, but you're away from ship activities.
Apparently a mid-size ship will have 12 terminals. That same thread talks about other ship sizes but not if they have more terminals.
I still submit that the pricing is entirely a function of what the market will bear, and not the cost of the service.
We know a densely populated land area can saturate the satellites overhead; it's part of the reason we don't use Starlink in, say, NYC. The same math applies to a thousand cruise ship passengers trying to use it at the same time.
(It will absolutely be much better than the previous state-of-the-art, though.)
Only recently (2025) has Starlink been documented to pass data between satellites and only for new ones. Cruise ships have had starlink for several years so the most common case will likely still be a single hop. Most cruises hug closely enough to the shore (within 100 miles) that a second hop isn't required.
It's not really a thousand passengers, it's just 12 terminals. Sure, those terminals are well oversubscribed vs a normal user terminal, but given the documented terminal-to-ground-station ratio (quite high), I'm pretty doubtful a cruise ship or 2 significantly impacts (or is impacted by) ground bandwidth. The density of users is just at the wrong scale for it to be significant.
The major point of a cruise is that there is constantly something to do. It's wall-to-wall entertainment, 24-hours a day.
My 2-year-old was too excited to sleep on a Disney cruise, so we just walked around and found character photos at 10PM. She was too shy to take her picture, so I got my picture taken with her hiding her face on my shoulder.
(FWIW: A cruise is also the kind of vacation that you need to bring some offline entertainment with you. I caught up on reading when I had to stay in the cabin with a sick child.)
I'm a die-hard nerd.
My vision of hell, is a Caribbean beach, mid-80s, warm breeze, clear water, and no internet access.
After that, it's more about your attitude.
Most people will manage without internet for a couple of hours.
A cruise takes much longer.
Whatever one legacy does, the other do - charge bag fees, the others do too within a quarter. Free internet (Delta afaik was the leader here) the others offer free internet.
Soon it will go the way of having an added fee or being tied to your ticket on the airline, w/ Tmobile its already linked to your phone number.
There's a technical reason for the case of airlines flying over land. Over land, the connection is just up to satellite and down to a ground station.
Over open ocean (whether airborne or on a ship), Starlink has to use their inter-satellite laser hops to eventually get to a ground station. I don't know for sure that Starlink charges more for this mode but if I ran the company I certainly would because those lasers are a limited resource.
IIRC Starlink gets more expensive when you need to route satellite-to-satellite rather than straight back to a ground station.
Source: I was a radio operator on Greenpeace ships for nearly 20 years
Cruise ships are tiny cities. The density overloads Starlink.
Hence why they meter and ration its access. Starlink cannot service an entire cruise ship at acceptable speeds for the same reason it can't service a Manhattan city block.
With 5000 people on a ship, that's enough bandwidth for half of them to watch HD video at the same time.
On land they want to spread out the bandwidth as much as possible, but on the ocean most cells are empty or only need a time share fraction of a beam, so they might as well focus on those mini cities.
Source for this capability?
Beams are 250MHz wide and they have 2GHz of allocation.