Internet on the Ship

We have reasonably good internet reception most of the time on the ship. I had had no internet on an Alaskan cruise when the ship was in the glacial bays…probably because we were so far north that the synchronous satellites were too low on the horizon give the steep mountains. I’ve heard that the only bad site for internet will be when we are near Leningrad because of the huge Russian submarine base nearby. The Russians jam most electronic signals there.

You can use the ship’s internet café, or you portable wirelessly. The ship also has a limited number of laptops that they will loan out once you have purchased time on their internet connection; however, you need to do this immediately because the number of computers is limited. I was surprised, but people who borrowed a laptop on day one could use it for 107 days if they wanted to do so.

The cost of time is not cheap. Their base price is $0.75/minute. You can buy a block of minutes for lower pricing per minute: 100 minutes at $60 ($0.60/min), 150 minutes at $75 ($0.50/min), 250 minutes at $100 ($0.40/minute), 500 minutes at $175 ($0.35/min), and 1000 minutes at $250 ($0.25/min). If you buy a plan and have minutes left at the end of the trip you get no refund.

Since we have a suite, we get the internet complementary, meaning they charge our account and then credit us back. (I prefer to think that they buried this cost in the premium that we pay for the suite, rather than give anything for free.) This is nice because it looks like at our usage rate, between Kathleen and me, we’ll use a little over $1,500 total for internet for the entire trip.

Even given that we really don’t pay, we tend to get on and off quickly…doing as much off line as possible. People who pay are still likely to pay around $1,000 for the entire trip. I might not have kept the blog up if I had to pay the regular prices for the time for all the postings.

The internet on ship can be slow. This is quite annoying when you are paying by the minute. My suggestion to anyone who is planning an extended cruise is to spend some time prior to the trip learning ways to minimize time on line.

Kathleen has a small Acer computer. It is nice and compact, but it is slower than mine. She wastes a lot of on-line minutes with the slower computer. If you are going to spend $1,000 in computer minutes on the ship, you might be better off to buy a faster computer prior to the trip.

There are also ways to download e-mail onto your machine. Go on line, download, then go off line to read and answer your e-mail for the next time you are on-line. This saves on-line minutes.

There are also ways to bookmark sites such that you can go on-line and download, then go off-line to read. This saves a lot of time with blogs.

We can use our portables wirelessly from our cabin, but it works a lot better if we crack open the down. Check with your internet café about how the internet reception works in various locations.