halcyonforever

:) I just reread what I typed and now can see how you had this question.

 

a more clear explanation might help LOL.

 

The internet package being $40 and the call from the room rate of 1.99 per minute could equal out to the same price of $40 for 20 minutes of call time.

 

If we use the internet package = $40 for unlimited internet calls through Skype longer and more frequent I think we would get more "bang" for our buck so to speak and the confidence we don't have to time calls home on the phone to avoid having an astronomical phone bill.

 

It seems as though the unlimited internet might be a better choice if we can use Skype if not I am thinking just calling home once or twice and limiting the time on the phone will be the option we choose.

Skype is actually not going to work real well on the satellite internet. The latency will make most online conversations range from frustrating to painful. Expect long delays in conversation, weird artifacts in audio/video.

(Source: I used to work for a satellite internet provider and these are just limitations of the technology. Satellite internet is great for streaming videos but not for two-way time sensitive communication)

One aspect of my job is Disaster planning. When you are building backup systems like these generators, you are playing a difficult balancing game. For example one system I designed was for a bank. When the backup generator was running, only the core computer systems, 1 heater and the lobby terminals had power. The rest of the building would be dark and cold. (assuming winter when all our power outages happen) This was the chosen design limit of the generator to keep the cost as low as we could. When it first came in to use, we faced much the same issue with the sudden realization that choices made at the planning stage of what critical systems to keep online did not include things that later seemed important.

I have no doubt that when designing the backup system, they made a priority list of every subsystem, put them in order and had to draw a line of what the backup is capable of running and what it could not. My guess is that a large focus of the backup system would be routed to propulsion, which on the triumph would have been rendered pointless due to damage from the fire.

In hindsight toilets and ventalation seem ovbious, but when you are sitting in a planning meeting trying to find where to draw the line on every watt of power, thinking that if you are using the emergency system you are probably one step away from lifeboating everyone, they don't seem nearly as important.

From an emergency response perspective, I really don't see the triumph situation as all that much of a "disaster" that everyone reports it as.

Fire supression systems worked.

Hull integrity was maintained.

Injury and loss of life was averted

When you work with disasters you often look for the very worst scenario and prepare for that. Situations that fall somewhere above that line while unpleasant, are much easier to deal with.

There are a host of ways that this could be unsuccessful. Comercial wireless routers don't work in quite the same way that a home router does, especially if it is setup for billing purposes.

Some routers have total isolation for non-authenticated devices. You get a sub net of 2 addresses, your device and the router. No traffic goes anywhere else until you log in to the splash page, even if you know the ip of another device. Many setups will have multiple routers with a central billing proxy. This will result in regions of the ship being able to talk to each other, but each router has it's own address pool and NAT.

What you are hoping to find is a network of distributed antenna's with a common controler and a billing proxy and isolation disabled. Not an entirely uncommon setup as it is one of the easier ones to troubleshoot and build.

Very cool idea but really going to be a crap-shoot if it works on a given ship or not.