emulsified

I am on the Breakaway right now, will be departing Bermuda in about 1 hour (5pm Bermuda). I paid $174.93 for unlimited Internet for my 7-day cruise. You need to sign up for it by 10am of the 2nd day of the cruise.

You can use as many devices as you want, but only 1 at a time, you basically bump each other off (but I will tell you what I did to use 4 devices at once below).

I have attached a snapshot of what the intranet site looks like where you login. Your session will timeout after a certain amount of time and each time you will need to choose returning user.

When you sign up for the package do it at Deck 6 with the Internet Manager, they will have you use one of the computers in the Internet cafe for the initial sign up. Once you have signed up you will be good to go.

Now, if you want to connect multiple devices at the same time you should pickup a travel WiFi router like the TP-LINK TL-WR710N 150Mbps Wireless N Mini Pocket Router, Repeater, Client, 2 LAN Ports, USB Port for Charging and Storage.

First you should configure this in Router Mode (Access Point) By connecting a cable directly to the LAN port, accessing the router Web Guo and setting an access point name and security settings. For the SSID I set mine to "MAINTENANCE", as I thought less people would try to connect to it. Since you will be using router mode this means you will be doing double-nat.

I was very impressed by the data speeds, much more than any other cruise I have ever taken.

Now as far as port blocking is concerned the Internet manager told me that as of right now only major streaming sites have been blocked. I have done various test because my business is run by me and there are many technical things I still check on late at night while everyone else is sleeping so I needed to make sure I had remote access to many different things.

I can tell you at night when people hit the bars that ports other than 80 and 443 are throttled. I didn't do a full spectrum traffic analysis because I'm on vacation after all and only wanted to check on my gremlins (employees) back at home.

I personally used OpenVPN vanilla 1194 UDP without a problem. However during busy times these ports and protocols get throttled and it was a no go. I then used OpenVPN TCP port 443 successfully.

I additionally used Private Internet Access (privateinternetaccess.com) on both my laptop and Android devices while connected through my travel router WiFi and directly to NCL WiFi without a problem.

For giggles I even streamed Netflix after 10pm with only a little bit of buffering.

I hope this information helps.

I am on the Breakaway right now, will be departing from Bermuda this afternoon. I plan to post my review of all things data once I'm back home this holiday weekend. So far the best data experience on a cruise yet.

Use a PPTP VPN connection and you can do whatever you want. ;)

 

Cheers,

 

Norman

I found your post above and I think we're on the same wavelength, can you help me out with these questions?

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?p=46512817#post46512817

STAYING CONNECTED @ SEA: Internet Access

http://www.ncl.com/about/staying-connected-sea-internet-access

A 7-day cruise on the Breakaway should cost $174.93 if one chooses the:

Unlimited Cruise Plan

$24.99 per day for cruises 1-12 days in length

*NOTE: As of January 2014, the Breakaway now has the iDirect X7 Satellite Modem/Router which is supposed to greatly improve speeds and available bandwidth.

The Unlimited Cruise Plan is ideally what I would choose because my work reimburses me for the cost because they have separation anxiety and seem to stock up on gasoline and matches before I go on vacation or so it seems. They try new things they would never do on any other normal day. And when it comes to technology they usually break things in new and creative ways.

If anyone has anyone cruised after January 2014 on the Breakaway I have the following questions (I want real world experience, not what customer service reads off of the same website I can read myself):

1. Is the package truly unlimited for data in the sense that I can use multiple devices for data use, laptop, smartphone and likely use my cabin information when signing in with the multiple devices?
    
   
2. How were the data speeds?
    
   
3. What times seem to have the most congestion or slowness?
   

The next questions are for the really, really technical people out there.

Unrelated to the data access, does anyone know of an Android app or root method of blocking the cell SID of the onboard cell service so that my smartphone does not register/associate to the ship's cell mobile network? In other words, blacklist the ships cell SID in my phone so my phone does not use it? Yes, of course I can turn mobile data off.

Additionally, does T-Mobile WiFi calling work through the ship's data like any other app that require a data internet connection or does the ship block it to make more revenue?

Do they block VPN tunnels?

Do they block SSH connections?

To anyone with solid information on the above I would greatly appreciate detailed responses.

Thank you.