This was discussed in DN community a lot. Cruise ships are useless for slow internet.
He fairly specifically said that the terrible net access was part of what made him productive.
Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
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Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#22Serious question - is the mobile signal terrible if you're cruising on the Med? My data plan is £2 a day for about 500mb (or something like that) when out of the UK. That would probably suffice, assuming there was enough signal to bother tethering...
Related question: does someone know how expensive is a satellite phone plan? I've seen the terminals are about $1000 a piece and they're hellishly slow but considering this kind of use in a ship or maybe in a distant place, it could be an option if the plan is not terribly expensive.
Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#23This was discussed in DN community a lot. Cruise ships are useless for slow internet.
Getting good Internet when you visit a town every few days and working offline while at sea is fine once you get used to it.
Maybe that's just because it's how I grew up with networks, doing everything in batch mode. ("Bluewave offline email", for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Wave )
Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#24Blimey, how rich are all of you? If I scraped together enough money for a cruise I sure wouldn't want to waste the experience working.
Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#25Serious question - is the mobile signal terrible if you're cruising on the Med? My data plan is £2 a day for about 500mb (or something like that) when out of the UK. That would probably suffice, assuming there was enough signal to bother tethering...
Related question: does someone know how expensive is a satellite phone plan? I've seen the terminals are about $1000 a piece and they're hellishly slow but considering this kind of use in a ship or maybe in a distant place, it could be an option if the plan is not terribly expensive.
Depends on location and provider, but I worked on a remote off grid monitoring station. We uploaded about 30 gigs a month over a satellite dish. The price was comparable to cell phone, but the ping was bad. 300 ms or so, occasionally much worse.
Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related question: does someone know how expensive is a satellite phone plan? I've seen the terminals are about $1000 a piece and they're hellishly slow but considering this kind of use in a ship or maybe in a distant place, it could be an option if the plan is not terribly expensive.
Depends on location and provider, but I worked on a remote off grid monitoring station. We uploaded about 30 gigs a month over a satellite dish. The price was comparable to cell phone, but the ping was bad. 300 ms or so, occasionally much worse.
Wow! I don't think my ADSL land line would be much better than that. The A is for asymetric, downloading is not too bad. I'm surprised it's not specially expensive. Thank you for the info!
Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#27Recently took a vacation on a cruise ship. I heard mixed reviews from everyone I talked to. Some loved it, some hated it. I loved it and can't wait to do another one. We got a balcony, and I loved just sitting out on the balcony and watching the ocean. I kept thinking how I wish I had my laptop and could do work this way. The free food, balcony, and exploring the ports were my favorite parts. I don't drink, or party,…
The crew, though, is paid more than they would be earning at home - that's why many sign up for multiple contracts in a row.
Also, if you can make friends with some crew, it's a blast.
Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#28Why not an all inclusive hotel/resort? Same benefits + reasonable Internet.
Way cheaper on a crusie to get all meals included. Try and find a same price per day for a benefit by benefit equal land cruise. They don't exist. You are getting free meals because most people on ships make up for it with buying alcohol and other high margin vacation purchases.
I see. I have always associated cruises with expensive, but it looks like this is not the case anymore.
Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cruise ships are slowly being outfitted with high speed spot beam internet access. A friend working on RCCL's Quantum Of The Seas can pull 50-60Mbps off hours.
Shared among hundreds of people... Not really reliable connection.
In my experience, these kinds of connections are QoS'd on a per-port/protocol level, so every client gets an equal amount of bandwidth on that port. If you can get a tunnel or vpn connection going on a less used port you'll generally get far more bandwidth. Being on a non-standard port also helps since the systems are often under provisioned for the size of the NAT table they have to hold.
That's all assuming you can get an open port between a remote server and you, but usually there's at least some way to get a connection on not 80/443.
That said my experience is pretty out of date so it could be different these days. Thinking back, since I figured out that I could tether my motorola v710 for free 10 or so years go, mobile internet has gotten faster and far more reliable, (though a lot more expensive once smart phones made data plans more than an underutilized $5/mo gimmick on feature phones,) I've rarely used public wifi.
Re: Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013)
#30Blimey, how rich are all of you? If I scraped together enough money for a cruise I sure wouldn't want to waste the experience working.
You can cruise on good ships for less than $100 per day, if you shop carefully and wait for the right opportunity.
The advantage is the combination of extremely plesant, varied work environments, with no distrations from clients, coworkers, or the internet. The ability to sustain concentration lets do something hard in a week that might take you three months at home.