Cruise Ship and Remote Island Internet Access

Some people would probably still say today that they don't need or want Internet access when going on vacation on a cruise ship or to a remote island. But I suppose their number is on a steep decline and cruise ship operators are investing in Wi-Fi Internet access on their ships not only in special areas but in cabins as well. According to this article (in German) the pleasure costs between 25 euros per week for "social media" access to 99 euros for 3 GB of data for a week on a ship of one of the major cruise lines.

The article doesn't mention what kind of backhaul is used but it's likely to be satellite. There's different kinds of technologies and (one of?) the latest and greatest seems to be from O3b, a company about which I wrote a post in 2008. It looks like in the meantime their medium earth orbit satellites (at an altitude of 8.062 km) are up and running and their public list of customers includes a cruise ship operator (though not the one mentioned in the first post linked to above) and remote islands. The specs advertised on their web page is a top speed of a single transponder of 1.6 Gbit/s and round trip times of around 150 ms. Each satellite has many independent transponders that can direct their beam to a specific area which hints at the capacity and user experience that can be achieved even if several hundred people on a ship need access simultaneously. Here's a video that demonstrates how the system works with two antennas that track the satellites.

And a final thought: I wonder if the uplink/downlink ratio on a cruise ship with lots of people posting their pictures and videos to social media websites is significantly different from the "land" average!? So apart from pleasing customers, a cruise line you probably can't get any better advertising than people posting their pictures in real time to Facebook…