Internet on Cruise Ships: Is the Starlink Ban Being Lifted?

Ryan: Alex, so how does internet work on cruise ships?

Alex Gizis: Well, obviously, cruise ships get pretty far from shore, so cellular to the towers on land is just not going to work, unless you're sitting in harbor. So it's pretty much all satellite, and there are a couple different services. The one that I think is growing in popularity the fastest is the new Starlink service, the SpaceX satellites whizzing by overhead in low Earth orbit.

Ryan: There's a lot more of them than there is the other satellites.

Alex Gizis: In fact, most satellites in orbit around Earth are Starlink satellites. So it's more than any other service. It's more than every other service put together.

Ryan: So I know Starlink relies a lot on ground stations. How do cruise ships get Starlink when they're so far from a ground station?

Alex Gizis: Right, good point. So the way Starlink normally works you talk to the satellite overhead, and it beams down to the nearest station, which is usually within like 100 miles or something, right? But that doesn't work a ship, so now they've added lasers between the satellites.

So from your ship, you talk to the satellite overhead, and it uses a laser to talk a satellite that's somewhere over the land and it talks down to the internet. It works really well. Although the latencies are higher, right? On ships I'm hearing it can get up to 99 milliseconds.

Ryan: Not bad for the middle of the ocean.

Alex Gizis: That's fantastic for middle of the ocean.

Ryan: So there's a lot of debate in our comments about why exactly Carnival wanted to take away Richard from the NoPantsProfits YouTube channel's Starlink dish. So like, why don't cruisers like you to have your own satellite modem on board?

Alex Gizis: So I think there are are a lot of reasons. I think number one, and you can't underestimate this, they want to make money. People start bringing their own dishes, they don't get to charge extra for the Wi-Fi. And I've got to think that drives most of their behavior. But ships operate under this complicated legal environment, right? If they get within 50 miles ashore, they now have to operate under the laws of that country. If they get further away, they have to operate under the laws of the country that they were registered with. And there are just so many rules and there is complicated navigation and there are Starlink dishes they're using to provide internet to other people.

Ryan: Right, because there is some limit to the bandwidth in one cell.

Alex Gizis: Yes. I mean, it's normally pretty high. But there is some limit, and I bet when you're in the middle of the ocean, it's lower. And if ten people put out their Starlinks, maybe now we're running into it.

Ryan: Could there be interference on top of hogging some of the bandwidth?

Alex Gizis: There sure could be. Although that's less of an issue than it used to be. I mean, it was true on airplanes, in the 90s, when the cell phones were super powerful, any airplane that still had electronics from, like, 10 years earlier, the early 80s or whatever, the electronics weren't that shielded, so there was a moment when cell phones were new that they really could mess up an airplane in a dangerous way. And now, honestly, it's perfectly safe. There's no danger whatsoever.

Ryan: Yeah, so Carnival now prohibits Starlink dishes in addition to other satellite dishes and other internet devices, routers, satellite phones, but not ham radios. Why do you think that is?

Alex Gizis: So Princess Cruises does ban ham radios. Although, there are lots of people online who said they wrote a letter in saying "I would like to use my ham equipment on my cruise" and they got special permission. I think they just want things tight and tidy and it's so much easier just say no and not have to worry about if this weird radio going to interfere with the ship's equipment. If you say no, there's no problem.

Ryan: So I know Starlink is going to start rolling out direct to cell on cell phones, where regular mobile phones will be able to connect directly to Starlink satellites. Those will effectively be satellite phones, so do you think normal cell phones are going to start getting banned from cruises because of that?

Alex Gizis: No I mean they just can't. They just can't. They can't take your cell phones. That would be crazy. Could you imagine the chaos, if they said no cell phones on the cruise, people would just find another cruise line, right? That would be the end of that.

But, that said, you can make a call, but this is not a service that's going to replace Verizon, replace T-Mobile, probably won't even replace the on ship calling network. But if you find yourself in a life raft, that satellite LTE could be the greatest service in the history of the world, right?

Ryan: Speaking of Starlink, a few people were asking how we were bonding to Starlinks our last video with this thing, so, you wanna talk a little more about that?

Alex Gizis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Miri router. This is just a fantastic new router. It has 5G, it has 4G, it has Wi-Fi, it has 4 Ethernet ports, 2 USB ports, and inside it, it runs Speedify.

So you can plug into multiple Starlinks, you can tether cell phones, you can put SIM cards in it, and either have it make a Wi-Fi hotspot or even join an existing Wi-Fi and maybe share to you out one of the Ethernet ports. And use Speedify to bond them all together to give you this just rock solid internet.

And it uses the same batteries as the Sony cameras, so you can either plug it in or you can just pop in a battery and run it off that.

So yeah, I had Verizon 5G, and then I had two Starlinks plugged in, and voila! I mean, the Starlinks, they're fantastic most of the time, but every once in a while, the performance dips so low, it's a disaster. And then, I pop over and use the 5G, and everything's totally cool. So this is the fun new toy from Miri.

Ryan: But you probably can't bring that on a cruise ship, right?

Alex Gizis: No, I mean the cruise ships, I'm hearing they're going through people's luggage looking for things with antennas things that look like routers and taking them. So, unfortunately, this is not going to work on your cruise ship because you're not going to manage to smuggle it on.

But for an RV, for a news crew, anything like that, you need something kind of rugged, you need something that can work on batteries if there's no power, Combining Starlink and cellular - this is kind of the ultimate solution.