Providing broadband internet access for cruise ship passengers has unleashed an insatiable beast, always hungry for more and more connectivity, satellite providers and cruise operators said last week at SATELLITE.<\/p>\n
Cruise passengers will \u201cconsume as much as you give them,\u201d said Guillermo Muniz, COO of OmniAccess<\/strong>, a connectivity provider for the cruise and high-end yacht market. Muniz compared the largest cruise ships to cities, with as many as 10,000 passengers.<\/p>\n Smartphones equipped with high-resolution cameras, combined with the cloud-based \u2018always on\u2019 culture they created, have massively expanded demand. \u201cYou\u2019re talking gigabits of connectivity,\u201d Muniz said.<\/p>\n But providing that connectivity to cruise passengers through the familiar type of Wi-Fi connection similar to what they have at home comes at a cost for cruise operators, Muniz acknowledged.<\/p>\n \u201cImagine, you\u2019ve got 4,000 iPhones. When you plug them in at night and they\u2019re on Wi-Fi \u2014 all the pictures and videos start syncing up to iCloud,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Cruise operators use network management tools to prioritize different kinds of traffic, said Maikel Miranda, senior director for Network, Voice, and Satellite Services at Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Passengers with premium packages, which include streaming video services, take bandwidth priority. \u201cThat traffic is going to have to go first,\u201d he said. Other, lower priority traffic, can be shunted to lower-cost connections with greater latency or packet loss.<\/p>\n Vessels have to be repeatedly retrofitted to meet growing passenger connectivity demands, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not acceptable that [the Wi-Fi] signal doesn\u2019t cover the balcony,\u201d said Miranda. Passengers complain if they lose a voice call in an elevator.<\/p>\n Muniz said that safety equipment and other regulated communications aside, Starlink and other large Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations are the only way to fulfill all of that demand currently.<\/p>\n \u201cStarlink is winning,\u201d he said. Cruise vessels might have SES\u2019s O3b Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation or legacy Geostationary Orbit (GEO) VSAT connectivity, but only as a backup, supplement or fail-over to Starlink, at least in terms of passenger internet connectivity.<\/p>\n \u201cI have run operations for 10 years,\u201d said Miranda, \u201cI am used to things working when everything fails.\u201d<\/p>\n SES<\/strong> CEO Adel Al-Saleh pushed back at the idea that Starlink is winning the cruise market in the Opening General Session on Tuesday morning. He said that while Starlink gets a lot of attention in the cruise market, SES has also seen continued success. SES connectivity solutions coexist with Starlink on every large cruise line. \u201cWe share that market share between the two of us, we\u2019re both growing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Panelists noted that Starlink does not offer a conventional enterprise deal, with a service level agreement that guaranteed connectivity. However, that could change soon. SpaceX<\/strong> CFO Bret Johnsen said during SATELLITE he believes Starlink is an enterprise-grade service and he is pushing for the service to include guarantees.<\/p>\n Always-on broadband has a different network footprint than conventional connectivity, observed Brad Grady, business development manager for satellite provider Hughes Network Systems<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s more symmetrical,\u201d because of the uploading to the cloud consumers expect, said Grady. \u201cIt\u2019s a big network management challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n Passenger expectations for connectivity have \u201cchanged out of all recognition,\u201d over the past decade Grady said.<\/p>\n But that could play to the operators\u2019 advantage. Many cruise passengers like to watch live TV, he said, which is traditionally traffic sent via legacy satellites, requiring a significant real estate footprint on the deck. Nowadays, passengers might like to stream their local stations via their phones and watch that on the internet-enabled TVs in their cabins.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re starting to see those second screen experiences,\u201d he said. Which again complicates network management issues.<\/p>\n In an industry that lives and dies by passenger satisfaction ratings, \u201cUser experience is really the key driver,\u201d said Grady, rather than technology. \u201cDo you really want all your eggs in one basket?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n \u201cIf somebody pays for a really great Wi-Fi experience, they expect their photos to get uploaded to the cloud,\u201d he said. \u201cNo matter what network management or other tools the operators employ, if a passenger is unable to upload, eventually that person is going to go complain to the nearest cruise ship employee and say, \u2018Why is my iCloud not working? I want a refund.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Providing broadband internet access for cruise ship passengers has unleashed an insatiable beast, always hungry for more and more connectivity, satellite providers and cruise operators said last week at SATELLITE. Cruise passengers will \u201cconsume as much as you give them,\u201d said Guillermo Muniz, COO of OmniAccess, a connectivity provider for the cruise and high-end yacht […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}