Unlimited Wifi: All or Nothing?

[seaofwonder]

Do you have to purchase the package for the entire cruise? Or can you just pick and choose days?

[Demonyte]

For the whole duration of the cruise.

Edited May 30, 2015 by Demonyte

[littleengine]

Does anyone know if you bought the unlimited package the first week of a B2B if it would carry over through the second as well? Reason I ask is when I was on the epic in February I bought the largest package available at the time because the staff in the Internet area said any minutes unused in the first week would carry over into the second week. They did, so I was able to save a bit by buying a smaller package the second week. Curious if unlimited works the same way.

[herdingdogmom]

Does anyone know if you bought the unlimited package the first week of a B2B if it would carry over through the second as well? Reason I ask is when I was on the epic in February I bought the largest package available at the time because the staff in the Internet area said any minutes unused in the first week would carry over into the second week. They did, so I was able to save a bit by buying a smaller package the second week. Curious if unlimited works the same way.

 

Unlimited internet plan was priced per day on our cruise earlier this month. $24.99 per day. My guess is that on a back to back, you purchase the plan again for the number of days for the second cruise. We actually went with the 250 minute package plan instead of unlimited since free wi fi was available in all the European ports and we just had a few sea days.

[littleengine]

So if you wanted the unlimited option they charged you daily for only the days you wanted? When I was looking at the things I could prepurchase on the NCL site Imsaw it listed, but the price was showing as about $180. There wasn't a daily rate option listed.

[GateGuardian]

So if you wanted the unlimited option they charged you daily for only the days you wanted? When I was looking at the things I could prepurchase on the NCL site Imsaw it listed, but the price was showing as about $180. There wasn't a daily rate option listed.

 

No, it's a one time charge, but it goes down as the day progresses. i.e I would never use internet on embarkation day, so I don't buy the unlimted internet package until Day 2. Which went down to $150. Is it worth it, it was okay, considering I mostly use it for twitter and email, but NCL does not use the new technology that RCL uses, so the internet is very slow at sea. I don't get about 3Mbps download and upload when the ship is at port though (for Getaway).

[herdingdogmom]

So if you wanted the unlimited option they charged you daily for only the days you wanted? When I was looking at the things I could prepurchase on the NCL site Imsaw it listed, but the price was showing as about $180. There wasn't a daily rate option listed.

 

As noted, it is a one time charge for the length of the cruise, but the underlying price is based on a daily rate. On our cruise a couple of weeks ago, it was $24.99/day. You can wait to purchase until later in the day on day 2 and the full price goes down by the pro-rata daily rate. So back to your original question, the unlimited minutes will not roll over for your second cruise on a B2B.

[Suzyrn89]

As noted, it is a one time charge for the length of the cruise, but the underlying price is based on a daily rate. On our cruise a couple of weeks ago, it was $24.99/day. You can wait to purchase until later in the day on day 2 and the full price goes down by the pro-rata daily rate. So back to your original question, the unlimited minutes will not roll over for your second cruise on a B2B.

 

Can we have more than 1 device logged in at a time, such as DH, DS and myself?

[Demonyte]

Can we have more than 1 device logged in at a time, such as DH, DS and myself?

 

 

No, it's one logged in session at the time. You can however use the same account from multiple devices, just not at the same time.

[Suzyrn89]

No, it's one logged in session at the time. You can however use the same account from multiple devices, just not at the same time.

 

Thanks, know of anyway to make a phone a hotspot while in airplane mode so that it will broadcast whatever signal it has, sort of like a router would do then we could all be logged in? I know it sounds like too much connection but have multiple kids to share it.

[Demonyte]

Thanks, know of anyway to make a phone a hotspot while in airplane mode so that it will broadcast whatever signal it has, sort of like a router would do then we could all be logged in? I know it sounds like too much connection but have multiple kids to share it.

 

 

I doubt that any current phones would be able to do that as you would be already using the WiFi connection to connect to the ship's system (of course I'm not too familiar with for example latest Android phones so my knowledge can be incomplete here).

 

I have however done that on my laptop by using two network interfaces - wired connection to connect the ship's internet and wireless to share it to another device (or vice versa, using wireless to connect to the ship's system and then having an ethernet cable between the laptops).

[martincath]

Depends what kind of phone(s), tablets etc. you're bringing whether you would be able to tether them together. Frankly though internet on board is slow enough for a single device, having multiple simultaneous connections would be worse than dialup.

 

But if you really, really want to do it bring your own router or if you don't have a spare, or just want to save space, there are dedicated travel routers/file servers that work really very nicely - I have a HooToo Nano (amazon, under $20 for the entry-level version) for using when hotels are being a**holes and selling wifi per device.

 

You're ultimately capped by the speed of the ship or hotel connection for internet use, but you can plug a USB drive in to it and stream files more than quickly enough to have up to 5 devices watching movies, TV etc that you have preloaded. We dump a batch of tv episodes for things we're binging on, then stream it to laptops or tablets.

 

NB: set up the HooToo BEFORE you travel, and make sure every device you travel with is set up to connect to it (I bookmark the login screen on my browsers like any other website) that way whoever is in the room first can easily fire it up to add your cruise login info to the device and everyone else should automatically connect to the device as it will already be in the list of known networks.

[GateGuardian]

Depends what kind of phone(s), tablets etc. you're bringing whether you would be able to tether them together. Frankly though internet on board is slow enough for a single device, having multiple simultaneous connections would be worse than dialup.

 

But if you really, really want to do it bring your own router or if you don't have a spare, or just want to save space, there are dedicated travel routers/file servers that work really very nicely - I have a HooToo Nano (amazon, under $20 for the entry-level version) for using when hotels are being a**holes and selling wifi per device.

 

You're ultimately capped by the speed of the ship or hotel connection for internet use, but you can plug a USB drive in to it and stream files more than quickly enough to have up to 5 devices watching movies, TV etc that you have preloaded. We dump a batch of tv episodes for things we're binging on, then stream it to laptops or tablets.

 

NB: set up the HooToo BEFORE you travel, and make sure every device you travel with is set up to connect to it (I bookmark the login screen on my browsers like any other website) that way whoever is in the room first can easily fire it up to add your cruise login info to the device and everyone else should automatically connect to the device as it will already be in the list of known networks.

 

I brought a HooToo router with me on the Getaway and it worked ok. Occasionally it would disconnect from the AP and I would be have to reconnect it manually. No biggie. I just set my SSID the same as at home so I don't have to set up more devices. Note that the router is pretty much confined to the room because it can't dynamically pick up the new AP as you're walking around (or at least my version can't), so when you're away from the room, you're pretty much restricted to 1 device at a time.