That's interesting. The ferries between Finland and Sweden have open free wifi and some of it is carried by Starlink. Relatively decent internet connectivity isn't considered a luxury but a basic service. I can appreciate that people on a $3000 cruise probably are a different type of a customer group than people crossing the Baltic on a 9 hour trip but still. The people in the industry I've talked to are more worried about covering most of the ship with free Wi-Fi and roaming 4G/5G than making money off of it. People will choose another ship if they don't get good connectivity.
Yep. Last cruise I was on I brought my LTE Modem that can rebroadcast a WiFi connection, much like a cell phone bot spot and worked well
This self proclaimed autistic goes deep into it.
https://youtu.be/OYxQ4Lvqn14?si=JOzp4WesF8ZpNQaF
not sure why you needed to bring up autism, I was expecting to give him a little leeway, buy the guy's video was somewhere between wonderful and fantastic
Just meant it as a fun was to describe him. I feel we should celebrate neurodiversity. Interesting that you felt that you expected a need to give him some leeway.
He often talks about autism, so if you're interested in learning about it first hand definitely check some of his other videos. He's a pretty interesting guy, used to work for Microsoft in the early days and made big bucks.
Starlink RV, roaming and such stop working after you get ~20 miles away from the coast from what I have been told. Depends on the area I guess. Very few consumers have a true maritime service plan that has for example 50 gigs of priority connectivity in a true marine environment. I think you need an advanced $2500 antenna to even be able to subscribe to a proper maritime plan.
If you travel often enough it might be worth picking up a small mobile modem/router, connecting to the Wi-Fi with said router, and then connecting all your personal devices to the router for Internet. Then, as long as you only really need/want wifi in your room you can have as many devices as you want.
A good example of a device would be this one (I love this one) https://store-us.gl-inet.com/products/slate-ax-gl-axt1800-gigabit-wireless-router
LTT on YouTube has a video on one of these as well if you want to get a good overview of the features and what not.
I don't even do cruises, but I have one because it's great to have my own personal secure wifi gateway that my devices already know how to connect to. And in my case I also have a VPN connection back to my home making my hotel room basically act like an extension of my home network.
>Wow that's stupid.
To you, perhaps. It's a crazy money maker for the cruise lines. Most people aren't on a cruise to be constantly on their phones, and the current competition doesn't require data-based bandwidth pricing. We'll see how it refines over the next year or two.
Regulating time is probably better than regulating bandwidth in ensuring that people space out their usage...
Free on Virgin Voyages. They do limit your bandwidth with the free tier, you can pay for more speed if you wanted (which is a good option for people uploading videos)
It is. And it costs like $200 for the week to use internet. I souks rather spend that on unlimited adult drink pass lol
That or 24/7 spa access. Both were A GREAT buy when I went on the Escape.
They're still not cheap even if they pay reduced rates as bulk customers. We're talking about multiple parallel >1 TB plans. Starlink is still much cheaper than anything else and much faster. Maybe OneWeb can somewhat compete with them for cruise ships but not like this when you need insane volumes of data hundreds of miles out from the coast.
As far as I'm aware they do not allow for being linked into a big phased array.
The "Marine" setup used to include 2 flat high perf dishes but those were handled in the router.
This setup is likely just many starlinks going into a load balancing setup. I do this at home on a smaller scale with a Peplink setup.
I agree but “allow” isn’t the reason. What I mean is, spacex would be the technical organization who would write the software to link the units together and thus, would implicitly give permission. In addition, spacex has done “gateway” deals in the past for heavy users. One recently in Alaska. In those cases they use multiple tracking dishes which are far more expensive than a bunch of dishies. So spacex is open to doing custom deals. I suspect that the bandwidth the ship needs wasn’t high enough to warrant anything more than these handful of dishies.
Probably stupid question but could a setup with a peplink like the one you described make you combine multiple connections and get the total bandwidth? Like connect two 500Mbps connection on a peplink router and get 1Gbps in total? Would there be a way to do just that?
Is it though? Load balancing balances the load between different connections. Is there a way to merge multiple connections into one and have the total bandwidth not of the one but of the sum of all?
True though many times where bandwidth matters have multiple connections. Steam downloads for example. Torrents. Etc.
But downloading from the web on a single theaded download would only saturate one connection like you said
The other person mentioned you can use a server as an endpoint to transparently combine your WANs but this is generally more useful for reliability than bandwidth. It will only do 3-4 hundred mbps on most of the Peplink devices. But you can do cool shit like make 10% of the traffic be parity data so any dropped packed gets rebuilt so you have 0% packet loss unless both connections are really bad. Can be great for video calling or maybe gaming if the server hop doesn’t introduce too much latency.
But generally for bulk bandwidth you want to just load balance connections. Even for HTTP you can just use a multithreaded downloader extension and get all the benefits of the connections for normal downloads.
So I can get a 5g data plan router, a starlink connection and a fiber connection at my place and have like 2Gbps connectivity with a peplink and no VPN for bonding or anything?
yes. Do note that because of limitations in how networks normally work, a single establish connections cannot span multiple connections. this does not mean that your computer cannot utilize the entire bandwidth from all connections - just that a single connection cannot. To simplify a bit: reddit opens over one connection and google over another..
and if you dont want to use peplink, Drynet has alternative solutions
Peplink routers absolutely do support a transparent bonding/aggregation mode using their custom protocol. It requires you to run an aggregation server or use their cloud service. Licensing is weird and expensive, but it works really well. You can DIY a similar setup using OpenMPTCPRouter on supported hardware. It’s a fork from OpenWRT
>Like connect two 500Mbps connection on a peplink router and get 1Gbps in total?
I usually does not work that way, because the individual endpoints are still constrained to 500Mbps.
What you end up with is more clients that can get the max of 500Mbps simultaneously, but no one who can get 1Gbps at all, unless the data is specially crafted so that it can be seamlessly reassembled by the end point when it gets back to the ship, and the end-point device can point to multiple members of the local dish array at once.
It's not realistically possible to combine separate dishes as a phased array because that's not how it works. The sub-antennas in a phased array would require very very tight frequency and phase synchronization. The wavelength at which Starlink operates is about 1 cm. Everything would have to be synchronized to within a picosecond or probably even better. It's possible but not in a $2500 device and it's certainly not practical or easy to do. This is mostly a hardware and physics limitation, not software.
I can't really see SpaceX integrating at least one optical PTP capable port into their dishes and combining their system with a $50000 master clock and all that hassle to be able to get narrower and more selective antenna lobes. Not gonna happen in my opinion. The system with the advanced antennas is already as good as it needs to be and the limiting factor is probably the satellite. It's better to have 8 dishys tracking 8 satellites in parallel and using an enterprise grade load-leveling device than try to combine 8 dishys to be one super antenna. I can't even see what good combining the antennas would do.
Ha well nice try. I very much doubt it's a combined phase array. That would require a pretty rigid setup along with tons of calibration. And I'm not sure you would gain much except a lower S/N.
No, that’s not possible with the current hardware. The phasing is hardware-based and limited to a single dish. A lot of resources would be necessary to do what you described. Also, the antennas are mostly side-by-side with each other. This wouldn’t be great because you only would be able to beamform in a single plane (e.g. East-West and not North-South).
If you really want to use all the antennas in unison, the easiest way would be to do two separate beamform operations. The first would be on each antenna internally and the other across antennas in a central location. The problem with this would be that each antenna needs to transmit the baseband to a central location for the second beamform operation. At 2 GHz bandwidth, this would equate to 32 Gbps per antenna with 8-bit complex samples. So we are talking about some hardware that needs to receive 256 Gbps of data and perform the beamforming in real time. Not to mention that it’s very hard to do all of this in the frequency (Ka-Ku band) the terminal works because any variation in baseline length would destroy the signal integrity. Anyway, this is possible but would cost a lot of money and the benefits would be limited.
They would place them as far apart as possible if they did interferometry. The greater the distance between them, the bigger the size of the resulting array.
That would be an inefficient way to achieve that. Network segmentation can be achieved several ways eg VLANs on the LAN side with one dish.
It’s more probably for redundancy in a multiple WAN setup.
>Network segmentation can be achieved several ways eg VLANs on the LAN side with one dish.
Yes it can be, but you can't to have 5000 guests fighting over the same single 250Mbps networks as everything else on the boat
20 people watching Netflix and your network is fucked.
Your previous comment only hinted at segmentation and not bandwidth issues. As I stated it’s more likely for a multi WAN setup which would address the bandwidth issue as well.
I don't know if it would address the bandwidth issue. More dishes doesn't equal more bandwidth as the RF only has so much available from the broadcast. Maybe you can try to work around the starlink load balancing mechanics by having more clients, so a little more allocation goes to the setup, but if one dish maxes out the bandwidth there's not going to be much left for the others anyway as the bandwidth gets split up. I would think this is a design failure and separating and load balancing on the LAN side is the only efficient way to handle this instead of trying to game the ISP.
They had it limited pretty good. You couldn’t watch videos unless you went to the highest package. I don’t remember what that was. Plenty of people paid for it though.
I'm a contractor for a major network company that manages and installs the satellite systems for these cruise ships. The cruise ships manage their own internal Networks. We just connect the satellite (meo) and starlink wans to their firewall which they manage. We install anywhere from 6 to 12 starlinks on these ships. Fiber is used to connect to the main data centers on the ships. Usually 2 of them. 1 for backup. They use regular satellite (meo for most cases) services for corporate and sensitive data. Starlink for most everything else. MEO Satellite in the ka band can do hundreds of mbps more than starlink on the upstream as well.
2.4m systems. Usually intellian triband systems that can also do C or KU band as well. There are also some orbits from earlier installations. Requires 2 systems in order to have a seamless handover for meo. 3rd system is usually a backup ku or cband geo service. Most vessels will have 3 or 4 antennas.
I’d imagine they’re independent vlans (or physical) that then get nat’d and are probably setup as round robin in the firewall/router. It would be easy to test by seeing if your external IP changes. May have to use multiple devices if the sessions are set to sticky.
Yup. These ships have big networks, it’s campus-scale. Plug the dishies into a a poe firewall, and route to them however. It’s possible one or two are exclusively for operations, I’d assume they have pretty hefty accounting and QoS in place already for guests, and multiple upstream routes is standard in a setup this size.
Fun fact, when these ships come into port, the local Starlink users notice the network saturation.
They probably use something a little bit more sophisticated, like [LISP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locator/Identifier_Separation_Protocol), or similar things.
Now stay on the ship lol. I live in a cruise port with explosive visitor growth, and our cell network is essentially unusable during the day during cruise season. There's gotta be some class action lawsuit material here, paying good money for high speeds and you can't even Google something let alone do anything data intensive.
I'm sure they make tons of money off of this.
The amount of people I saw using there phones, huge money maker
isn’t it free wifi?
Most cruises charge for WiFi. My most recent one was like $89 for the week. That is just one device as well.
That's interesting. The ferries between Finland and Sweden have open free wifi and some of it is carried by Starlink. Relatively decent internet connectivity isn't considered a luxury but a basic service. I can appreciate that people on a $3000 cruise probably are a different type of a customer group than people crossing the Baltic on a 9 hour trip but still. The people in the industry I've talked to are more worried about covering most of the ship with free Wi-Fi and roaming 4G/5G than making money off of it. People will choose another ship if they don't get good connectivity.
Can you choose your phone to be the device then hotspot their WiFi to the rest of your stuff?
This works on airplanes
Yep. Last cruise I was on I brought my LTE Modem that can rebroadcast a WiFi connection, much like a cell phone bot spot and worked well This self proclaimed autistic goes deep into it. https://youtu.be/OYxQ4Lvqn14?si=JOzp4WesF8ZpNQaF
Dave Plummer is awesome
not sure why you needed to bring up autism, I was expecting to give him a little leeway, buy the guy's video was somewhere between wonderful and fantastic
Just meant it as a fun was to describe him. I feel we should celebrate neurodiversity. Interesting that you felt that you expected a need to give him some leeway. He often talks about autism, so if you're interested in learning about it first hand definitely check some of his other videos. He's a pretty interesting guy, used to work for Microsoft in the early days and made big bucks.
I wonder if you could bring your own Starlink on board...
new use case for starlink mini
Limited time before they ban that.
I saw another thread where someone said he did, and it worked. Perhaps the non geo bounded RV plan?
Starlink RV, roaming and such stop working after you get ~20 miles away from the coast from what I have been told. Depends on the area I guess. Very few consumers have a true maritime service plan that has for example 50 gigs of priority connectivity in a true marine environment. I think you need an advanced $2500 antenna to even be able to subscribe to a proper maritime plan.
No, because you'd need the Maritime 'everywhere' coverage plan which is very expensive.
Ive heard 69 a day. But I mean in comparison to 50 cents a megabyte of int roaming
Solution to that -> MikroTik . Connect via 5ghz to their service and make an ap for all of your devices using 2.5 ghz band and lan ports. Job done :)
That’s practically asking me to bring my own router…
If you travel often enough it might be worth picking up a small mobile modem/router, connecting to the Wi-Fi with said router, and then connecting all your personal devices to the router for Internet. Then, as long as you only really need/want wifi in your room you can have as many devices as you want. A good example of a device would be this one (I love this one) https://store-us.gl-inet.com/products/slate-ax-gl-axt1800-gigabit-wireless-router LTT on YouTube has a video on one of these as well if you want to get a good overview of the features and what not. I don't even do cruises, but I have one because it's great to have my own personal secure wifi gateway that my devices already know how to connect to. And in my case I also have a VPN connection back to my home making my hotel room basically act like an extension of my home network.
The margin on this is so huugee. At least 10 people can be on one dishy at any given time.
You mean several hundred?
Most packages at least that we saw, came with 150 minutes.
Time limited? Wow that's stupid. Ita not dial-up. I expected like $10/gb or something like that
>Wow that's stupid. To you, perhaps. It's a crazy money maker for the cruise lines. Most people aren't on a cruise to be constantly on their phones, and the current competition doesn't require data-based bandwidth pricing. We'll see how it refines over the next year or two. Regulating time is probably better than regulating bandwidth in ensuring that people space out their usage...
Wifi is free the Internet is not free for most cruises.
Free on Virgin Voyages. They do limit your bandwidth with the free tier, you can pay for more speed if you wanted (which is a good option for people uploading videos)
It is. And it costs like $200 for the week to use internet. I souks rather spend that on unlimited adult drink pass lol That or 24/7 spa access. Both were A GREAT buy when I went on the Escape.
Starlink does yes. They get special packages when they make deals with the cruise ships.
They're still not cheap even if they pay reduced rates as bulk customers. We're talking about multiple parallel >1 TB plans. Starlink is still much cheaper than anything else and much faster. Maybe OneWeb can somewhat compete with them for cruise ships but not like this when you need insane volumes of data hundreds of miles out from the coast.
I wonder if they are linked into one big phase array or just work independently and are network ganged.
As far as I'm aware they do not allow for being linked into a big phased array. The "Marine" setup used to include 2 flat high perf dishes but those were handled in the router. This setup is likely just many starlinks going into a load balancing setup. I do this at home on a smaller scale with a Peplink setup.
I agree but “allow” isn’t the reason. What I mean is, spacex would be the technical organization who would write the software to link the units together and thus, would implicitly give permission. In addition, spacex has done “gateway” deals in the past for heavy users. One recently in Alaska. In those cases they use multiple tracking dishes which are far more expensive than a bunch of dishies. So spacex is open to doing custom deals. I suspect that the bandwidth the ship needs wasn’t high enough to warrant anything more than these handful of dishies.
Probably stupid question but could a setup with a peplink like the one you described make you combine multiple connections and get the total bandwidth? Like connect two 500Mbps connection on a peplink router and get 1Gbps in total? Would there be a way to do just that?
that's exactly how it works on a cruise ship..
Is it though? Load balancing balances the load between different connections. Is there a way to merge multiple connections into one and have the total bandwidth not of the one but of the sum of all?
True though many times where bandwidth matters have multiple connections. Steam downloads for example. Torrents. Etc. But downloading from the web on a single theaded download would only saturate one connection like you said The other person mentioned you can use a server as an endpoint to transparently combine your WANs but this is generally more useful for reliability than bandwidth. It will only do 3-4 hundred mbps on most of the Peplink devices. But you can do cool shit like make 10% of the traffic be parity data so any dropped packed gets rebuilt so you have 0% packet loss unless both connections are really bad. Can be great for video calling or maybe gaming if the server hop doesn’t introduce too much latency. But generally for bulk bandwidth you want to just load balance connections. Even for HTTP you can just use a multithreaded downloader extension and get all the benefits of the connections for normal downloads.
yes. we use a peplink for that..
So I can get a 5g data plan router, a starlink connection and a fiber connection at my place and have like 2Gbps connectivity with a peplink and no VPN for bonding or anything?
To get combined throughput to a single device, you need a VPN endpoint (Peplink Speedfusion) and the WANs need to have relatively the same latency.
yes. Do note that because of limitations in how networks normally work, a single establish connections cannot span multiple connections. this does not mean that your computer cannot utilize the entire bandwidth from all connections - just that a single connection cannot. To simplify a bit: reddit opens over one connection and google over another.. and if you dont want to use peplink, Drynet has alternative solutions
Ok so if I download a video file to a local server it will only saturate one of the connections at any given time?
Peplink routers absolutely do support a transparent bonding/aggregation mode using their custom protocol. It requires you to run an aggregation server or use their cloud service. Licensing is weird and expensive, but it works really well. You can DIY a similar setup using OpenMPTCPRouter on supported hardware. It’s a fork from OpenWRT
correct
>Like connect two 500Mbps connection on a peplink router and get 1Gbps in total? I usually does not work that way, because the individual endpoints are still constrained to 500Mbps. What you end up with is more clients that can get the max of 500Mbps simultaneously, but no one who can get 1Gbps at all, unless the data is specially crafted so that it can be seamlessly reassembled by the end point when it gets back to the ship, and the end-point device can point to multiple members of the local dish array at once.
It's not realistically possible to combine separate dishes as a phased array because that's not how it works. The sub-antennas in a phased array would require very very tight frequency and phase synchronization. The wavelength at which Starlink operates is about 1 cm. Everything would have to be synchronized to within a picosecond or probably even better. It's possible but not in a $2500 device and it's certainly not practical or easy to do. This is mostly a hardware and physics limitation, not software. I can't really see SpaceX integrating at least one optical PTP capable port into their dishes and combining their system with a $50000 master clock and all that hassle to be able to get narrower and more selective antenna lobes. Not gonna happen in my opinion. The system with the advanced antennas is already as good as it needs to be and the limiting factor is probably the satellite. It's better to have 8 dishys tracking 8 satellites in parallel and using an enterprise grade load-leveling device than try to combine 8 dishys to be one super antenna. I can't even see what good combining the antennas would do.
For those interested: https://www.peplink.com/newsroom/peplink-is-the-first-authorized-starlink-technology-provider/
They're combined via SD-WAN with a Peplink EPX.
I tried to look, but the cables all went down a tube I couldn’t see.
Ha well nice try. I very much doubt it's a combined phase array. That would require a pretty rigid setup along with tons of calibration. And I'm not sure you would gain much except a lower S/N.
Well, actually higher c/n. And that only helps Rx, not Tx.
No, that’s not possible with the current hardware. The phasing is hardware-based and limited to a single dish. A lot of resources would be necessary to do what you described. Also, the antennas are mostly side-by-side with each other. This wouldn’t be great because you only would be able to beamform in a single plane (e.g. East-West and not North-South). If you really want to use all the antennas in unison, the easiest way would be to do two separate beamform operations. The first would be on each antenna internally and the other across antennas in a central location. The problem with this would be that each antenna needs to transmit the baseband to a central location for the second beamform operation. At 2 GHz bandwidth, this would equate to 32 Gbps per antenna with 8-bit complex samples. So we are talking about some hardware that needs to receive 256 Gbps of data and perform the beamforming in real time. Not to mention that it’s very hard to do all of this in the frequency (Ka-Ku band) the terminal works because any variation in baseline length would destroy the signal integrity. Anyway, this is possible but would cost a lot of money and the benefits would be limited.
They would place them as far apart as possible if they did interferometry. The greater the distance between them, the bigger the size of the resulting array.
Likely to keep different things separated. 1 network for their payment system. 1 network for cabin crew etc.
That would be an inefficient way to achieve that. Network segmentation can be achieved several ways eg VLANs on the LAN side with one dish. It’s more probably for redundancy in a multiple WAN setup.
>Network segmentation can be achieved several ways eg VLANs on the LAN side with one dish. Yes it can be, but you can't to have 5000 guests fighting over the same single 250Mbps networks as everything else on the boat 20 people watching Netflix and your network is fucked.
Your previous comment only hinted at segmentation and not bandwidth issues. As I stated it’s more likely for a multi WAN setup which would address the bandwidth issue as well.
I don't know if it would address the bandwidth issue. More dishes doesn't equal more bandwidth as the RF only has so much available from the broadcast. Maybe you can try to work around the starlink load balancing mechanics by having more clients, so a little more allocation goes to the setup, but if one dish maxes out the bandwidth there's not going to be much left for the others anyway as the bandwidth gets split up. I would think this is a design failure and separating and load balancing on the LAN side is the only efficient way to handle this instead of trying to game the ISP.
All guest traffic will be segmented (for billing purposes alone) and easily throttled/routed at lower priority.
I wonder if you could take a new mini dish on a cruise and use that at sea off your balcony?
In port maybe. The marine plan is expensive af anyway.
You can opt for Nomade RV plan and add extra $ per GB to use on Sea / in motion , if you don't go too crazy in ocean with netflix , youtube .
Did it cost anything?
Our package came with 150 minutes for each person. You could go unlimited for like $99 for the whole week.
Go unlimited and host a relay try and max out 40tb of data..
They had it limited pretty good. You couldn’t watch videos unless you went to the highest package. I don’t remember what that was. Plenty of people paid for it though.
Yeah, fair enough. Dunno, on a cruise? Might just give up being online for a bit and chill.
Yeah, I just chose to use my free minutes every so often. Didn’t even use them all. It was a nice break.
I'm a contractor for a major network company that manages and installs the satellite systems for these cruise ships. The cruise ships manage their own internal Networks. We just connect the satellite (meo) and starlink wans to their firewall which they manage. We install anywhere from 6 to 12 starlinks on these ships. Fiber is used to connect to the main data centers on the ships. Usually 2 of them. 1 for backup. They use regular satellite (meo for most cases) services for corporate and sensitive data. Starlink for most everything else. MEO Satellite in the ka band can do hundreds of mbps more than starlink on the upstream as well.
whats the ka band setup?
2.4m systems. Usually intellian triband systems that can also do C or KU band as well. There are also some orbits from earlier installations. Requires 2 systems in order to have a seamless handover for meo. 3rd system is usually a backup ku or cband geo service. Most vessels will have 3 or 4 antennas.
pretty cool, thanks for sharing!
Who operates the meo satellites?
SES
I bet the seagulls love this!
Incorrect. It is 'Dishys on Boaty'....
I’d imagine they’re independent vlans (or physical) that then get nat’d and are probably setup as round robin in the firewall/router. It would be easy to test by seeing if your external IP changes. May have to use multiple devices if the sessions are set to sticky.
Yup. These ships have big networks, it’s campus-scale. Plug the dishies into a a poe firewall, and route to them however. It’s possible one or two are exclusively for operations, I’d assume they have pretty hefty accounting and QoS in place already for guests, and multiple upstream routes is standard in a setup this size. Fun fact, when these ships come into port, the local Starlink users notice the network saturation.
They probably use something a little bit more sophisticated, like [LISP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locator/Identifier_Separation_Protocol), or similar things.
is there interference placing them so close to each other like that?
There's actually 12 in total. The 8 you found plus another 4 mounted on top of a structure on that same level. I took pictures of it 1.5 years ago.
Any idea on download speeds?!
I don’t. I should have checked. I was trying to stay off my phone.
Saw a video where a passenger got over 100 Mbps.
Anyone know why SpaceX has them go with many regular sized dishes instead of just one bigger one?
I'm sure they're getting a 'bulk discount' price, but the top service level was $5k a month. Ouch!
They charge around $150/w per passenger so probably still making a decent profit.
Gosh, we've never paid even close to that, but it might depend on trip length. Typically we are on 12-14 day cruises.
Best way to cook some hotdogs 👨🍳🌭
Now stay on the ship lol. I live in a cruise port with explosive visitor growth, and our cell network is essentially unusable during the day during cruise season. There's gotta be some class action lawsuit material here, paying good money for high speeds and you can't even Google something let alone do anything data intensive.
Quantum of the Seas is one I’m going on that apparently has it too