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Royal Caribbean to use SpaceX's Starlink to provide internet onboard their fleet
- nexus7556 4y agoLink is broken, missing query parameter. Should be https://www.rclinvestor.com/press-releases/release/?id=1613 https://www.rclinvestor.com/press-releases/release/?id=1613
- indigodaddy 4y agoI’m going to guess that they already had/have large satellites for television and/or emergency services though?
- stephenhuey 4y agoNot just emergency - several companies provide satellite internet service that cruise ship passengers can use. https://www.cruisecritic.com/articles.cfm?ID=1419 https://www.cruisecritic.com/articles.cfm?ID=1419
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Retric 4y agoTheir needs are mostly about cheap internet costs reasonably close to shore. Presumably they will continue to need their existing systems on repositioning cruses until Starlink’s satellite to satellite communication works but 90% of their needs can be met without that.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoDeployment isn't complete until end of 1Q 2023, by which time Starlink expects to have global coverage.
- colechristensen 4y agoThe satellite you see currently needs to be able to see a ground station, there’s no hopping between satellites. Coverage will be limited to these line of sight constraints until the communication between satellites works.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago> until the communication between satellites works. which is Q4 2022, and Royal Caribbean implementation is Q1 2023, so that's moot.
- Retric 4y agoIn theory Royal Caribbean implementation finishes in Q1 2023, but that doesn’t mean individual ships aren’t going to have Starlink in Q3 2022. Further, Starlink is aiming for Q4 2022, but that’s not guaranteed.
- Retric 4y agoUse on individual ships isn’t going to wait after instillation of global coverage when they can start saving money on day one. Especially as global coverage is likely to be less than perfect at the beginning.
- InvaderFizz 4y agoI expect that except for trans-Atlantic/Pacific, Starlink already has more than sufficient coverage. My Starlink connection in Baja California Sur goes through a hop in Arizona, 800 miles away. This means that all of the Caribbean is likely covered as well as all of Costal Americas.
- Retric 4y agoFor Alaska cruses they do reposting via the Panama Canal by crossing the which isn’t completely over Ed by Starlinks current network. https://satellitemap.space/?norad=48119 https://satellitemap.space/?norad=48119 They would also see gaps when traveling further offshore to avoid bad weather etc, until global coverage working.
- ceejayoz 4y agoTV is one-way from high orbit; you just need a receiver. People have had that at home for decades already. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirecTV_satellite_fleet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirecTV_satellite_fleet Emergency service - distress, weather, etc. - go through constellations like Iridium. Low bandwidth, high latency.
- mabbo 4y agoMakes sense. This is the target demographic for this service. 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.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoRCCL charges, last time I checked, $20/day (which does not seem onerous for access to high speed internet on the ocean) for customers to use internet on each vessel (this might have changed, haven't been on one of their boats since COVID started). Access for crew and staff is heavily subsidized as a perk. This is more of a high volume customer selecting a vendor who can provide a better offering (versus O3b MEO [1]) at possibly a better cost (at volume) imho. TLDR SpaceX via Starlink is eating the TAM of disparate satellite data providers (Iridium via T-mobile partnership and direct US DoD sales, O3B and OneWeb via mobile terminals and high end marine/aircraft deals, etc). When you've made enough rockets, you go where the margin is (which, for global satellite comms, is ~$75B/year). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b
- radicaldreamer 4y agoA lot of cruises have free on-board internet, especially those aimed at a younger audience.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danpalmer 4y ago> RCCL charges, last time I checked, $20/day (which does not seem onerous for access to high speed internet on the ocean) 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!
- macksd 4y ago
- webel0 4y agoT-Mobile just started advertising that they can be used on any flight. I think this is just a second signal that the market is moving towards Free(ish) WiFi on planes, boats, etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- the_duke 4y agoDirect to cell service will be very slowand restricted. Not comparable to Starlink powered service you will be able to get on flights.
- brokenodo 4y agoI haven’t seen the specific announcement this thread is referring to, but it sounds like it will essentially be an extension of the free inflight messaging T-Mobile has long offered on Wi-Fi equipped flights, except that it will work on flights without Wi-Fi. Extremely low bandwidth and limited to only messaging apps, but an extension of a service they already offer.
- wongarsu 4y agoT-Mobile's plan is "New SpaceX satellites have giant antennas that your smartphone can reach with a puny bandwidth, if you don't have cell signal you can use that satellite connection for messengers and maybe calls". Royal Caribbean's plan is "We have lots of space and power on these giant cruise ships, let's put a couple dedicated Starlink antennas on them to sell better WiFi to our passengers". Plan 1 won't encroach on plan 2 yet, unless all you care about is Whatsapp.
- filoleg 4y agoThe free inflight messaging that T-Mobile offered was just a "free offer for customers of T-Mobile" deal on services provided by an in-flight internet provider. Basically a "free doordash premium subscription for chase sapphire reserve customers" type of a deal. 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. 0. https://gogoair.com https://gogoair.com
- irrational 4y agoI known there is a guy at work that already uses starlink for his home internet service (he lives out in the middle of nowhere). Could he keep using starlink while traveling, including on a cruise ship, without incurring any additional costs?
- HWR_14 4y agoNo. The "travel in an RV" otherwise meaning traveling outside of your home cell is extra. And the maritime version is $5,000/month
- toomuchtodo 4y agoThis is not entirely accurate. You can use Starlink in RV mode on a vessel, you just don't get the higher throughput and availability of having two antennas and the orchestration for them. There is some nuance. https://youtu.be/zN8ECQrot8g https://youtu.be/zN8ECQrot8g
- HWR_14 4y agoI'm pretty sure that Starlink will start identifying and dealing with nautical customers who don't use the nautical package. Right now, it's like a legacy mode. But after enough nautical antennas have shipped, they're not going to deprioritize the $5k/month customers
- mabbo 4y agoI believe the "RV" version of the service costs more but lets you move around over land- but they charge even more if you want to use it at sea. The reason is that SpaceX only can support so many users in a given region because each satellite has limited bandwidth.
- BurningFrog 4y agoI think the main issue is Starlink still needs a nearby groundstation to work. That gets harder at sea... I guess Royal Caribbean never goes that far from land?
- yosito 4y agoCruises were one of the last places in the developed world where people could be completely disconnected from the internet. I used to go on yearly transatlantic cruise vacations. As someone who works online, I never feel "on vacation" unless I'm fully offline. That's becoming harder and harder these days. While I do think this is a cool technology, on a personal level, I'm mourning the loss of one of the last truly disconnected spaces in our world.
- groby_b 4y ago"one of the last truly disconnected spaces"... that's gone for a LOOONG time. I remember remote-debugging a critical crash from a cruise ship in 1996. (Via fax. It was... an experience :)
- felipemnoa 4y agoWonder if you could make this into an interesting short story, or maybe even a screenplay for a movie using lots of creative license.
- groby_b 4y agoI don't think I could. But if you want to take it and run with it, it's all yours. (Give me a credit shout-out when you're all famous ;)
- tjmc 4y agoMH370 disappeared more recently than that. Hard to believe it could happen again though - particularly with the forthcoming phone to sat services from SpaceX and Apple.
- Someone1234 4y agoThis is very cruise dependent. Any near-shore cruises may have a constant cellphone connection. 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.
- tjr225 4y ago[flagged]
- Maursault 4y agoOdd phrasing, because these still remain among your favorite things. I don't really care for cruise ships, and though I don't really mind mouthy uberrich people, they are definitely not among my favorite things.
- Dylan16807 4y agoNo, that's not what "least favorite" means.
- Maursault 4y agoHow else, then, would one verbalize the lower and lowest ranks of one's favorite things? If you listed your favorite things in order as only raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, then whiskers on kittens is your least favorite thing. And if you only had one favorite thing, then it, also, would be your least favorite thing. ...unless you're suggesting "least favorite" is an English idiom.
- Dylan16807 4y agoI wouldn't really call it an idiom. The idea is that you can rank everything on the same scale, with one end being most favorite and the other end being least favorite. If you want to say "still among my favorites, but barely", you need to use a different wording.
- aidenn0 4y ago"least favorite" can be used euphemistically to mean "most hated"
- jesterson 4y agoWhat stops you from just passing by and not leaving snarky and pointless comment?
- tirwander 4y agoI mean, regardless how you feel about Starlink, Elon, etc... this is only logical.
- aaaddaaaaa1112 4y ago
- encryptluks2 4y agoI'm curious how no other company has managed to even directly compete with Musk when it comes to a service like Starlink. I believe it had to go through regulatory approval. Did no other companies get contracts to provide a similar service, or is this just regulation enabling monopolies?
- wumpus 4y agoTons of companies can provide services to cruise ships, with bandwidth and latencies depending on how sophisticated their satellites are, and their choice of orbits. SpaceX has 3 direct competitors in similar orbits. All 3 have global (ITU) regulatory approvals, but are behind on building and launching things.
- betwixthewires 4y agoSpaceX has the in house launch capacity, they can launch at cost. Nobody else can do that yet.
- pavon 4y agoIt isn’t regulatory - Amazon and OneWeb also have regulatory approval for satellite broadband constellations and have little to show for it. 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.
- mschuster91 4y ago> I'm curious how no other company has managed to even directly compete with Musk when it comes to a service like Starlink. 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_constellation#First_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio... [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satellites-cost-well-below-500000-each-and-falcon-9-launches-less-than-30-million.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satell...
- prakhar427 4y ago
- ryandv 4y ago
- _8j50 4y agoMeh. Having seen a lot of benefit from reducing internet usage, I am split on this. I could really do OK with years of no internet. HN and a few news sites are all that I regularly visit and I am doing so much better now.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoIt will be interesting to see when Starlink is going to have some competition. SpaceX managed to get to market first with a low cost network of cheap satellites. But there are others that are trying to do that as well (e.g. OneWeb). There are a few other companies like Amazon with similar ambitions. But it seems they each are years away from going live. Also, SpaceX is the cheapest way to get to orbit now so a lot of these companies are probably struggling on the cost front.
- caymanjim 4y agoI've been using "Starlink for RV" for a couple months now. It's nice in that the alternative is often nothing at all, but it's not nearly as reliable as I'd like. I'm constantly battling trees, because it wants to look really low on the horizon. Even when I have full line of sight to all of the sky, it cuts out with some frequency (multiple times per hour) for anywhere from a couple seconds to half a minute. And the speed is heavily throttled on the RV plan (or on the "portable" plan for those who primarily have a fixed address). 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.
- alphabettsy 4y agoThat’s unfortunate to hear. I was considering buying this for travel and I’ve been looking for objective feedback. I’m seeing very mixed results.
- robertlagrant 4y agoWorth waiting for their laser links to come online and see if they improve things. May be coming by the end of the year.
- grecy 4y agoLike many things that are overcrowded, the experience is vastly different when you leave the lower 48. Remember this is a global service. 95.75% of the world's population do not live in the US. 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.
- capableweb 4y ago> Remember this is a global service 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.
- brtkdotse 4y ago> fantastic in some ways, but I think they've massively oversold it Seems like par for the course for most Musk ventures
- ItsTooMuch 4y agoCould we please tone down these comments about Musk? Literally every thread about SpaceX/Tesla/etc has dozens of them. It's not interesting at all anymore, and adds nothing to the discussion. Everybody has already heard this opinion dozens of times.
- kenny_r 4y agoI don't disagree with your sentiment, but I think it's interesting that this reached the front page of HN at all, and I have to think it's _because_ of the cult of personality around Musk. 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.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoI don't venture too far on the internet, but the only thing like a cult of personality around Musk I've seen is the anti-Musk cult going on and on about how he is a "garbage human", he's a fraud, not a real engineer, and how annoying his cult followers are, when it comes to any vaguely related topic. 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.
- 4y ago
- nottorp 4y agoThis being cruise ships, will it cost a kidney or half your house and a kidney?
- znpy 4y agoI can already foresee a new wave/trend of fancy people working remotely from cruise ships.
- MengerSponge 4y agoNow this is a perfect market fit for two shockingly polluting industries that probably should be banned by the developed world.
- paul_f 4y agoI think this greatly helps Royal Caribbean with younger customers who simply cannot be 100% disconnected. I have customers I need to be available for if something goes wrong. I won't even consider a 7-day cruise. But now I can. Looking forward to this new service.
- stewx 4y agoI have a goal of taking a ~14-day transatlantic cruise with Royal Caribbean and working 4hrs a day from my laptop onboard. This news makes that much more of a feasible option!
- some_random 4y agoHN discussions on starlink are so interesting, the idea that satellite internet is competing with copper or fiber is insane to me. There are tons of issues, but holy shit this is incredible. I think most commenters really don't understand what the SOTA was in terms of cost, reliability, bandwidth, and latency.
- macinjosh 4y agoHow much does a used cruise ship go for? I want to create a cruise ship based incubator. If a startup succeeds they eventually get their own ship.
- spiralx 4y agoJust make sure it goes better than it did for these guys: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satoshi-cryptocurrency-cruise-ship-seassteading https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...