In the early days of cruising, Internet delivered via satellite used to be slow, expense, and charged by the minute. My strategy was to connect, download mail, disconnect, process mail, and reconnect. Often the minutes would tick away due to poor connectivity. Over the years, internet has improved both in availability (in room WiFi) and speed, especially as ships switch over to Starlink.
Cruise ships used to provide a single account that could only be active on a one device at a time. Some cruise lines are now allowing two devices but that still means logging out of the second to get Internet access for the third. I initially used Connectify Hotspot on my laptop to create a local secure hotspot but switched to a travel router running OpenWRT and Travelmate. Unfortunately, compact travel routers with build-in batteries are hard to find. I started with a RAVPower RP-WD03 which had insufficient RAM and lacked 5GHz radios. I recently replaced it with a RP-WD009 which RAVPower unfortunately no longer sells. Most cruise ships and hotels use a captive portal requiring periodic sign-in to enable WiFi - they are getting increasingly sophisticated and sometimes require some sleuthing to figure out the exact steps that the travel router needs to follow.
When ships are away from land cell towers, they switch to Cellular at Sea, an onboard cell service via satellite. Costs are very high and not covered by roaming packages. However, inbound text messages are free, useful for two factor authentication (2FA) for websites that only support SMS. A cruise last year had no Cellular at Sea for most of the cruise - any 2FA authentication had to wait until the ship was in port. Applications like Messenger and Signal support chat and audio/video over the Internet if both parties are running the same application. Skype is similar but also supports calls to landlines/mobiles and SMS.
When off the ship, I avoid using cell roaming due to the high costs. Easy Roam sounds appealing if you are using data/voice/text regularly, but a single text message can be expensive. Ports often provided free WiFi, but speeds can be slow. When I travelled to Europe regularly for ISO annual meetings, I picked up a Vodafone UK "Pay as You Go" SIM card. Whenever the daily charge reached £1, I would get unlimited voice/text and 500MB data within Europe. Charges for calls to North America were quite reasonable. The SIM card was less attractive after Brexit, but Vodafone offered various roaming packages that were considerably less expensive than Easy Roam.
This year I tried Airalo eSIMs that are available for a wide range of countries, regions, as well as global coverage. Installation prior to the trip was easy - I could order the eSIMs online, scan the QR code on my phone to install the eSIMs, and complete the configuration - the eSIM only activated when I reach my destination. Almost all eSIMs only provide Internet access but do not replace my Koodo SIM card so I can continue to receive 2FA text messages without having to swap SIM cards or carry a second smartphone. Koodo notifies me of voicemails via SMS - I would use Skype to pick up the message and respond. Unfortunately, Skype is going away in May. Although Teams appears to have some SMS support, the free version does not allow calling landlines. I am investigating Voice over IP options - stay tuned for more details.
Blog comments