"2) Internet is expensive, slow, and charges by the minute). " When I've been on cruises (this dates back to as early as 2002 iirc) I've always been concerned

"2) Internet is expensive, slow, and charges by the minute). " When I've been on cruises (this dates back to as early as 2002 iirc) I've always been concerned with this. And there are times as well (when sailing) that you are out of reach by satellite and have no connectivity at all. Unless things have changed you aren't going to be streaming video or doing anything that requires bandwidth. Once again, from my experience, things could have changed as I haven't cruised in at least 4 years. With respect to internet on cruises it's a totally YMMV. I was concerned enough about access that I actually tracked down and contacted the operator of the service [1] for the particular ship I was on (and they do this for many cruise lines) and spoke to an engineer to ask questions before taking a particular cruise. I wasn't going to rely on what the cruise ship customer service told me. One of the questions I had was "do you block any ports"? The engineer (quite knowledgeable not customer service but engineering) said they didn't but it turned out that (at the time) they blocked anything that carried voice or obviously video (like ichat, skype etc.). Have no idea if that is still the case. But here is the strangest thing. Back in perhaps 2004 on a particular ship you couldn't (get this) connect by wifi with a Mac!. That's right you had to have a windows machine to connect to the ships wifi. Made no sense. But true. Nobody on the ship with a mac could connect only PC laptops. Ended up having to use the crap in the "Internet Cafe" which made 1996 using AOL seem quick. Literally couldn't even get email during certain times since all ship traffic went through one pipe. For the next cruise I also brought a PC laptop. (But on that ship I didn't need it). [1] It was this company: http://www.mtnsat.com/ http://www.mtnsat.com/