On board WIFI

[charity709]

Hi everyone!

 

First time cruiser - second post on this forum. Had great answers for my first question, so figured I'd throw another out there.

 

We are booked on Celebrity Constellation in May for Western Mediterranean. 

 

We were able to choose 3 of 4 promotions when we booked (drink package, free prepaid gratuities and onboard credit) and now are wondering if we made a mistake not choosing unlimited internet.  I didn't realize that roaming packages on our cell phone wouldn't work at sea (rookie mistake, lol).  From the website it seems like we can only buy packages for the whole cruise which is very costly. I'm mostly concerned about wanting to connect on our 2 sea days.

 

My questions are - do you usually forego wifi while cruising? If you do pay for it, is the service spotty or slow on the ship? Do you feel like it's worth the cost?

 

Thanks!

Edited January 26, 2019 by charity709

[Clarea]

 

For information specific to the ship and cruise line, it would be good to also post in the Celebrity forum:

 

https://boards.cruisecritic.com/forum/16-celebrity-cruises/

[txflood33]

We didn't have the wifi for our Med cruise. Med cruises are so port intensive that I was ok with skipping email/facebook/etc for a day. We had no issues in any of our stops with finding free wifi steps from getting off of the ship in a small restaurant or coffee shop.

 

You will also probably get a bag of mixed results for 'quality of wifi' here. some will say it was fine. Some will say it was slower that dial up. I'm sure there is a lot that can affect your speed in the middle of the ocean....weather, satellite strength/positioning, how many people are using at the time you want to sign on, is someone trying to upload and email that 30 page image/chart heavy powerpoint presentation for work and you just want to send an email to the kids.

 

Our next cruise is to SE Asia. We opted for Go Best so internet is included. The only reason we even considered getting the internet package was knowing the fact that some sites are blocked in China...and possibly other Asian countries. We simply wanted to be able to get to social media sites to share our trip with family and friends. If we weren't going to be in China, we wouldn't even consider it. Just doesn't seem worth the price for the few sea days.

[Hlitner]

Forego WiFi?  LOL!  For some folks, especially younger cruisers, this is akin to losing an arm or a leg!  For many of us seniors, who have somehow managed to live and cruise for decades without WiFi, it is not a big deal.  In fact, we get a substantial amount of free WiFi on Celebrity (a perk for being Elite Plus) but often do not use nearly all of that free time.  On ships, our phones normally go into our cabin safe as soon as we leave port.   We might check our e-mail once a day or try to Facetime (difficult with the lousy WiFi on many X cruises) with our Grandson....but that is about it.  Since our phones are on a T-Mobile plan, we do get free data (no extra charge) and texting in nearly every country/island (over 200 countries).  So we might use our phones when within range of shore-based towers.

 

If you must have WiFi for whatever reason you will simply have to pay the price.  Just beware that using the Internet on ships can often be very sloooooow…..to a point where it can even take 5 min just to logon.  Things have been getting better on some ships (with newer high speed satellite connections) but Celebrity has yet to catch-up to much of their competition.

 

Hank

[charity709]

12 minutes ago, Host Clarea said:

 

For information specific to the ship and cruise line, it would be good to also post in the Celebrity forum:

 

https://boards.cruisecritic.com/forum/16-celebrity-cruises/

Thank you! New to this site so didn't even realize there was a Celebrity forum! lol

[charity709]

8 minutes ago, Hlitner said:

If you must have WiFi for whatever reason you will simply have to pay the price.  Just beware that using the Internet on ships can often be very sloooooow…..to a point where it can even take 5 min just to logon.  Things have been getting better on some ships (with newer high speed satellite connections) but Celebrity has yet to catch-up to much of their competition.

Thanks for your comment. 🙂  If the connection is slow it would definitely be a no-go for us.  We'll just have to try to survive somehow LOL.

[Hlitner]

7 minutes ago, charity709 said:

Thanks for your comment. 🙂  If the connection is slow it would definitely be a no-go for us.  We'll just have to try to survive somehow LOL.

On cruises where we must pay for WiFi, we will sometimes wait a few hours (after boarding) and ask a few others (who we see online) about the connection.   It is only in the last 2-3 years, that some ships have started getting decent WiFi/Internet connections.  On our last two cruises (Regal Princess and the MSC Divina) we had the best Internet we have ever experienced in over forty years of extensive cruising.  I honestly do not mind paying for decent WiFi/Internet....but hate paying for a connection that makes a 1200 baud (you must be very old to know what this means) connection seem fast.

 

Hank

[SRF]

One issue about cruise ship wifi is that it is satellite based.

 

While download speeds can be pretty good (I have seen 5 mega bit speeds on RC), the ping times are quite long.

Ping is the time it takes for a request for data to go from your device to the server and back again.  The problem comes with some websites that have MANY requests to fill the page.  Amazon is one that I know of.  It can take 5+ minutes for Amazon to load, even with a 5 MBPS download speed.

 

Not sure about Celebrity, but on Royal Carib, we buy a one device package.  And one person uses it for a bit, then the other person uses is.  This is allowable under Royal Carib package.