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Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

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Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is .1% problems Cruises are a stereotypically mass-market vacation. In most cases they’re cheaper than a hotel.

But still, Google says there's about 30 million cruise passengers per year, or less than 0.4% of the world. Close.

Exactly. And then add to that people that just happen to bring an openWRT router on a cruise with them

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#92
post #6

[flagged]

Just want to clarify that my intent was not to say that internet is essential. However, I do need internet access for my job and in general, it's nice to be able to keep in touch with friends.

If you need to still be accessible to your job while on a cruise there's something wrong somewhere. I mean I guess said job must pay well, but still

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#93

Internet on any ship is expensive as soon as you're out in maritime area - where data transfer is done via satellite services. So it is not necessarily because a captive market, where the cruise liners can fleece you. They pay crazy prices to the telecom/ISPs. So if you're getting free internet out at seas, it is really at the cost of the ones actually paying the bills - or in this case, the cruise liner.

I'm assuming these large cruise corps can get a decent bulk/business discount though.

Pre-Starlink, no, not really. Some discount due to the bulk payment, yes, but the bandwidth is simply not there to allow for such discounts, especially in high-demand areas like Africa and the Pacific where satellites have a double-duty to serve land-based customers.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#95

For those complaining about "first world problems"... for me this would be both about the sense of injustice and the joy finding a technical solution. We're on Hacker News, after all.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but anyone on a cruise is almost certainly wealthy by global standards; it's not like there are poor people there to feel bad about for not having faster internet

Workers maybe?

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to contrast Starlink on airlines vs Starlink on cruises. AFAICT, all the airlines rolling out Starlink have made it free on their flights. Which implies cooperation from Starlink -- either Starlink has made "free" a condition of their service, or they've just priced it cheap enough to make free a reasonable option for airlines. There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced sig…

Planes, at most, have a couple hundred people onboard. Cruise ships are getting towards the 10k person mark. One cruise ship will be substantially more load on the local satellites and ground station than a plane will.

I’d guess that concurrent demand would be lower on a plane. A cruise ship has people with nothing to do wandering around, presumably screwing around on the internet being one of them.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bandwidth of a single starlink terminal is going to be saturated at airplane capacity anyway. The extra number of people on a cruise ship just means service degradation, not excess bandwidth consumption. The price difference is just based on what the market will bear. Trapped on a cruise for a week, you are much more desperate for Internet. Plus you've paid a lot more for the trip and the fee doesn't feel so larg…

> The extra number of people on a cruise ship just means service degradation, not excess bandwidth consumption. Which is resolved by charging, a lot, so there's enough bandwidth per active paying person.

Yeah, but there is a limit to the price the market will bear. At 10k users and assuming a single terminal, and a single price, you are going to not going to be able to price it so as to optimize price vs performance.

Personally I would have at least 2 terminals, a low tier and high tier. I would sell only a limited number of high tier connections, good for the entire trip. Probably included as a perk with first-class cabins. The low tier would be a daily purchase. I mean hotels have done this for ages.

Maybe a dedicated business center with wired (dongle) connection and kiosk PCs, that gets the best bandwidth of all, but you're away from ship activities.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#98
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to contrast Starlink on airlines vs Starlink on cruises. AFAICT, all the airlines rolling out Starlink have made it free on their flights. Which implies cooperation from Starlink -- either Starlink has made "free" a condition of their service, or they've just priced it cheap enough to make free a reasonable option for airlines. There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced sig…

There is one very good reason: Supply and demand. Most people will manage without internet for a couple of hours. A cruise takes much longer.

Being away from the internet for a week is settling point imo. I hope they keep the price high so I won't cave in and buy it.

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#99
post #4

I would never take a cruise but in other places with paid wifi that I did not want to pay for, IP-over-DNS tunneling worked well.

Which services or apps do you advise for it?

Iodine is the go-to for IP-over-DNS tunneling: https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

Back in the Before Times when my wireless telephone didn't support tethering / hotspot iodine was very handy, albeit excruciatingly slow.

Very rarely did I find a network I couldn't tunnel out of. Virtually nobody thinks about DNS exfil.

(Did a gig one time where we did live-off-the-land exfil of base64 encoded data using CERTUTIL, CMD, PING, and tcpdump running on an off-site DNS server.)

Re: Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

#100

This is actually quite common: I've been on ferries, at airports, even hotels, which give you some amount of time for free, often anonymously. So just a mac address change gives extra internet. New Android versions make it especially convenient, with a "Wi-Fi non-persistent MAC randomization" option in the developer options, meaning you can just "forget" the wifi network and connect again with a fresh mac address. In…

My ISP had a captive portal to show when the connection was disconnected and had 1.1.1.1 whitelisted on all ports for some reason.

Back then the CF did not restrict the IP for quad 1 IP, so I could access any CF enabled site without any charges.

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