Mobile phone coverage on Australia cruises

Were sailing up the east coast of Australia in November on Rhapsody of the seas. From experience last year on P&O, i found the satellite internet to be useless.

So my question is, how far from the Australian coastline do the ships sail. The Telstra website says that it offers good 3G coverage for up to 70kms out to sea. Would the ships go out further than 70kms when cruising Australia.

A lot of the time the ships are further than 70km from the coast. Obviously they have to stay in the shipping channels. I would only count on mobile coverage on port days (coming into port, during the stay and for a while after leaving).

yes totally agree once you set sail signal is soon lost. Be careful to turn your roaming off or you may get a big international bill when you get home. If you turn roaming off you won't make the mistake of thinking you are connected to your home network when you are not. Same with your ipad if you are using one.

Yes, agree, ports only, even in the brisbane river. :)

We were on the QM2 in March, Fremantle to Sydney, and was very surprised to see we had 3G service all the way.

From my experience Telstra 3G is available between Melbourne and Sydney and also available a great amount of time when cruising through the great barrier reef/queensland area.

We did a 'Sydney to Newcastle' which went for a day to Port Macquarie and back again (to fill in the time really as it was a two day cruise)

I turned roaming off on my phone and I had 3G phone and internet access most of the way. It was great as I was sort of still at work too, so just answered the phone when I had to, sent the odd email to keep things ticking over at work, and then got back to my holiday. So that worked out really well. And we could ring person to person on the ship to organise where we were going for lunch etc. It was pretty handy.

We also have done a trip from Sydney to NZ and picked up a NZ sim card over there. Then had NZ 3G access for all the ports. It did drop out at night as we left the 3G coverage and came back in the morning as we had 7 days where we were in port each day. So that was handy as well. Cost all of $15 and I had internet, email, could dial into work to fix the odd problem - all from the balcony of a cruise ship. Loved it!

But to get back to your question ... I'm not sure how far from the coast the cruise ships will sail but I'm guessing you will get good access for some of the time, and other times you might not have any for a bit. Overall though, it should be good enough for sending emails home every so often and checking the web here and there.

I was on the Rhapsody to NZ and back last year. In the middle of nowhere I used the satellite internet for my webmail and it seemed OK. I could check email and send mail - I was never on it for long, but it did get me out of trouble for the days we weren't within NZ 3G range or Aus 3G range. Funny when you get back into Sydney (some distance out, be it 30km or 70km or whatever it) everyones phone starts getting messages, beeps, rings, etc You can tell we are home!!

I did a Sydney to Brisbane in May and had 3G coverage with Virgin/Optus most of the way up the coast.