[isawczuk]

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?

[jasoncartwright]

Pirate seaborne internet has been tried.

"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...

[isawczuk]

Maybe military is not best place to have "piracy internet", yet I think with current tech - internet access should not be an issue.

[emchammer]

How in the bloody hell do you install a Starlink on a submarine?

[jotux]

Went on a cruise last summer, the internet on board was starlink. It was advertised at $30/day.

[bryanlarsen]

It's interesting to contrast Starlink on airlines vs Starlink on cruises.

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.

[ornel]

Regular internet on ships is a flat rate for the ship owner (except for Inmarsat, which is hugely expensive and only used if nothing else works) and the big issue is sharing limited bandwidth with all users. Before Starlink this meant blocking all streaming for our ≈35 people crew, unless you used a VPN, which allowed you to bypass blockage and would get you banned if caught. It's a huge cat and mouse game that burned too much of my time. But then, cruise companies are sleazy as fuck and totally deserve this.

Source: I was a radio operator on Greenpeace ships for nearly 20 years

[JumpCrisscross]

> curious why they don’t just install Starlink to cut costs

Cruise ships are tiny cities. The density overloads Starlink.

[Dylan16807]

Starlink can do half a gigabit per beam and point 8 beams at the same cell.

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.

[mmmlinux]

Except for all the ships that do use Starlink I guess.

[ajmurmann]

I thought [name-redacted] in fact used Starlink [link-redacted]

[rahimnathwani]

GP is talking about the employees getting their own Starlink sub, and competing directly with their employer's service.

[cr3cr3]

Lately they do, along with LTE/5G deployments near docks. Still expensive as they often outsource the networking to external vendors/

[jlarocco]

Probably because they've had internet on cruises since long before Starlink existed and it's expensive to change. And why bother if people are willing to pay for it?