Carnival Corp set to boost internet speeds and offer new wifi packages

Carnival Corporation have just announced that their 10 brands which include P&O, Cunard, Princess, Holland America, Carnival and Costa have been or soon will be fitted with a new satellite communication system that will drastically improve their data connections at sea.

The new Wifi@Sea system has already been introduced on some ships and with the remaining to receive it by the end of 2016.

Wifi packages have always been based on a per minute basis but new packages are going to be introduced that have more of a focus on usage and bandwidth restrictions. The packages may vary a little from one cruise line to another but I believe that there will be a social media package which will have users restricted to a number of social sites like Facebook and Google Plus for example. Another package which would allow more browsing but with video and audio streaming restricted and then a full on package that allows it all.

Internet packages at sea are definitely getting more popular but they aren’t going to be widely free or a lot cheaper any time soon.

I do have clients complain about the internet charges from time to time and often people are used to free wifi hotspots in numerous places on land. At sea the situation is completely different, they cant just hook up a fibre cable or plug into a phone land-line connection, everything must be done by satellite which obviously costs a considerable amount of money.  The connection then has to be shared between the entire ship, if too many people were using the connection at the same time it would likely saturate the connection making it really slow and unusable for everyone.