Being able to check your email, catch up on news from your favorite sports team, or update your social media accounts while cruising is nothing new. In fact, it began way back in 1999 on the Norwegian Sky! But in recent years, cruise lines have gone to great lengths to bring faster Wi-Fi to the high seas. This is no small task either. Keep in mind that a major cruise line needs to figure out how to allow thousands of people to access the internet at the same time and at a reliable speed. While this might be easy to achieve in an office building, it’s a bit trickier when you’re surrounded by hundreds of miles of ocean!
The closer you are to a Wi-Fi access point or antenna, the better the connection, which is why many major cruise lines have updated their technology by installing customized Wi-Fi antennas and combining them with the latest in satellite access.
Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) now offers SpeedNet, which is equipped on all 23 of their ships. Plans range from daily plans to packages that include a set number of minutes. NCL even offers a data plan on the Norwegian Breakaway, where you can purchase 300 or 1,000MB of data.
Packaged offerings are not exclusive to NCL, as the industry has realized that offering passengers a tiered structure of access appeals to a broader base. Passengers can choose between per-day options or pay up front for a set amount of data usage on many of the leading cruise lines.
Royal Caribbean was one of the first major cruise lines to realize that allowing passengers to access their social media accounts to post updates, photos, and videos instantly turns them into brand ambassadors. RCCL’s Voom service was designed with this very purpose in mind. Passengers can stream and upload music, movies, and videos on all 25 Royal Caribbean ships. Celebrity Cruises has followed suit and unveiled its Xcelerate service, again capable of generating enough bandwidth to allow for video streaming and even a satisfactory gaming experience!
We all know that technology evolves faster than it can be kept up with, and while Wi-Fi at sea has yet to be perfected, it has grown by leaps and bounds since the first internet café debuted in the last millennium. Since today’s state-of-the-art breakthroughs are quickly surpassed by tomorrow’s innovations, the onboard experience will only continue to move faster and further out to sea!
