Cruise ship internet - maybe not Cunard's fault

[ballroom-cruisers]

There have been numerous posts about the internet service on board being intermittent and not at the level people expect.  One thing that has not been mentioned is that it seems this is not restricted to just one ship, and indeed there are posts elsewhere that the internet service on other lines, and in multiple different geographic areas is also not as it should be.  There has been reported incidents of cyber attack on satellite based internet facilities related to the ongoing war in a country we are all well aware of, and it is highly likely that the communications going through the systems of Inmarsat and other satellite comms companies are still being impacted by such attacks both in the recent past as well as new attacks continuing through the year.  So it may be beyond Cunard's control to get the internet working well on board.  However at least the My Voyage service, which is not dependent on the external internet, and only depends on the ship's internal systems and network, should be working without any problems, and at least some of the issues experienced with that service may be due to particular problems with the phone or tablet that is connecting rather than an issue with the service itself. It would be interesting to hear directly from Cunard about whether the internet disruption is due to known problems with the satellite communications outside of their control, or not.

Edited July 10, 2022 by ballroom-cruisers
typo

[ballroom-cruisers]

I can't vouch for the state of Cunard's internal systems - but there have been complaints on the forums for other lines about the internet. However there are certainly times when the wifi signal is strong and consistent but the internet drops out - and presumably if the wifi connection is stable but the external internet isn't then that is most likely to be the satellite signal. However it is also the case that the way in which their system is managed 'could' be run such that a failed external connection does not drop the connection to the wifi - after all at home I can have a laptop connected via wireless to my local home network, and if the external broadband drops (it is rare) then the laptop remains connected to the local network and simply reconnects to the external internet when that comes back online.  It would seem that Cunard's system is managed such that if the satellite connection vanishes, then you are disconnected from the ship's local network, which appears to be the source of many people's frustration.  Of course you can also be in a place where the local wireless connection is weak and varies as people and objects move around between your phone/tablet and the nearest wireless access point - such as in a room where the AP is some way down the corridor, which will certainly not help.  I have been in the Carinthia lounge with a nice strong wireless signal, and still have the internet drop out for periods, but the main thing that should not happen is that the wireless disconnects as well despite the wireless signal being strong!

Edited July 10, 2022 by ballroom-cruisers
typo

[Host Hattie]

Interesting, I've seen the complaints on the boards for other lines but there have always been more complaints on this board.

I've not sailed since 2019 but I have always managed to post to social media, check my email and moderate here at sea !

I usually use an Android phone and I know service can be device dependent.

[ballroom-cruisers]

We have been on cruises on Cunard ships in March and May this year, and both times (two different ships) the internet was erratic from one hour to the next, and subject to disconnection at random, irrespective of how strong the wifi signal was at the time.  I use a modern Android phone with the latest, and fully up-to-date, version of Android with all system updates applied, so the device should be as optimal as it is possible to use ( it works flawlessly everywhere other than on the ship!). Occasionally I would have half an hour of solid connection, even in the stateroom, but other times it was dreadful even at a table in the Corinthia Lounge on QM2 despite being right underneath a router on the ceiling above me. At port at such times it was much better to connect to the local mobile phone land signal (even in the stateroom), and have fast solid connection rather than continue to rely on the ship's wifi. There were also times when even the My Voyage connection would simply disappear with the wifi signal level not being so low it should have been an issue.  Prior to the pandemic, although there could be times when the connection would disappear, due to the satellite signal being non-optimal, it does seem to be markedly different now, relative to the service it used to be. ( I don't generally carry a phone with me around the ship, so take it when I am planning to catch up with email, or use My Voyage, but not much else - time enjoying the cruise life is the priority!)

Edited July 10, 2022 by ballroom-cruisers
Added sentence

[njguy_south]

If Cunard is losing it’s internet connection (as suggested), then the ship’s connection to worldwide shipping information would also be affected, and the ship would be sailing blind. 
 

Cunard needs to upgrade it’s internal system, especially by installing more wifi boosters around the ship. That requires money and investment by the company, which is struggling to stay afloat.

 

Satellite connections exist WORLDWIDE! Even in jungles. It is not 1979, where one needs to wait for the satellite to re-orbit from the other side of Earth. 

[ballroom-cruisers]

I have seen occasions where the ship mapping does not show up to date shipping positions - so I guess that positional data is also disrupted at some level. However the ships still have radar as well as their own GPS positioning and navigation, to stay safe.

[ew101]

If the behavior of the Internet aboard has deteriorated since 2019, this sort of thing  viasat: Satellite firm Viasat probes suspected cyberattack in Ukraine and elsewhere, Telecom News, ET Telecom (indiatimes.com) could maybe, possibly be a temporary and random explanation for a little bad behavior.   However, denial of service attacks against a carrier tend to be time bound and build to a peak.  If you leave your attack going for days and days, the people running the Internet can eventually track down the sources and block the attacking traffic.  

 

On the QM2, I think there are two semi related issues.  One is the Wi-Fi, which may  (see P.139 of the Payne book) have been added after the ship was built.   This is tricky on a ship, as any metal (cabin walls, doors, bulkheads, decks) blocks signals perfectly. A repeater/access point/antenna in every room (at least) is the best answer.   The second issue is the satellite link.  Which can be full and or impacted by heavy sea conditions.  And the satellite head-end Internet service could be attacked.  But I think it's full.  

 

The excitement around newer mobile Starlink Internet is three fold.  The satellites are low earth orbit, so the latency (delay) is lower.    The technology is newer, and the satellites "see" less of the earth so get less interference from other earth stations on the uplinks.   PCMag Study: Starlink speed and latency top satellite Internet from Hughes and Viasat's Exede - Technology Blog (comsoc.org)

 

Edited July 10, 2022 by ew101

[ballroom-cruisers]

ew101: yes, and indeed you quote some sources that I have seen. One of the problems of the DDOS attacks, is that the attackers usually don't drive the software from their own machines, but often use AWS virtual machines, or compromised computers including innocent users of their own PCs, so tracking down the ip address from where the attack comes from often won't help, and the attackers have so many ip origins that they can push the attack for quite extended periods. So unless the C&C origin machine can be tracked down it is often hard to protect an attacked system, unless the administrator is very good at keeping logs of packets coming in and what the incoming stream is doing, and then blocking the source ip addresses as an ongoing firewall activity that has to be monitored and updated on an almost daily basis.  I doubt if Cunard has that level of technical expertise working on each ship, IT systems, but I would love to be shown to be wrong. However I guess this is moving to a very technical set of posts, that is perhaps beyond what the cruise critic admins would like us to discuss at this level.

[tv24]

Unfortunately Cunard is now selling an upgraded internet service that costs more and promises greater ability to stream and other activities.  We happily bought this more expensive product on our June 22 crossing, but found the connectivity no better than the poor service we have received in the past.  So our frustration was doubled, very poor internet service as always, but also paying more for it!  I felt like a stupid consumer wasting his money.

[TheOldBear]

I spoke briefly with Steve Payne after an onboard lecture [he and I seemed to be the only gents onboard wearing a QM2 necktie] and he said the ship was wired for networking using the EIA768B standard [the so called CAT5 wiring] but was intended for relatively slow 10 mbps networking. It would be a fairly major rewiring job to install a fiber optic backbone and shortening some of the CAT5 wiring to allow for higher speeds.

On the other hand - I do hope that the planned Starlink enhancement of satellite to satellite laser links will enable mid ocean use of the service [in addition to, or in place of the geosynchronous sats]. 

[ew101]

1 hour ago, TheOldBear said:

 the ship was wired for networking using the EIA768B standard [the so called CAT5 wiring] but was intended for relatively slow 10 mbps networking. It would be a fairly major rewiring job to install a fiber optic backbone and shortening some of the CAT5 wiring to allow for higher speeds.

 

So the fix for the Wi-Fi is to survey the ship, and put in more Ethernet switches and more wireless access points where the signal is weak.  These are getting cheaper and faster every year.  Category 3 to 5 twisted pair wire is fine to start with and a reliable signal everywhere at even 10-100 megabits per second may be better than what we have.  The gradual adding of more fiber as the ship is worked on (i.e. when you open a ceiling or replace a pipe down the hallway)- pull fiber- can add capacity to the wiring plant.   This would have been a good pandemic/lockdown project.  

 

The fix for the satellite is one or more faster dishes/services.  These can be expensive.   

 

[ew101]

4 hours ago, ballroom-cruisers said:

  I doubt if Cunard has that level of technical expertise working on each ship, IT systems, but I would love to be shown to be wrong. However I guess this is moving to a very technical set of posts, that is perhaps beyond what the cruise critic admins would like us to discuss at this level.

Unless she was hosting an MI-6 convention this week, I would not think attackers want to attack the ship's modest servers or reach into the onboard network - they would need the ship's firewall address.  Most likely they attack the satellite service ground uplink station.  This makes the attack the problem of the service provider who has experts on staff.  

 

The idea the Edwardian Internet service on Cunard is a result of the current world conflicts seems implausible.  We now know the ship's Internet system may date as far back as the scone recipe.  

[ballroom-cruisers]

Yes good points. It would be interesting to know the satellite uplink/downlink capacity though. It that was already constraining the throughput, then having more nominal offerings of higher capacity for video messaging, with a lot more passengers now using video upload/download including video calling may put a severe strain on the system even if the satellite service was not affected by world events.

[ballroom-cruisers]

Also I guess that with a huge cash burn during the first year and a half of the pandemic, and reduced passenger income now, there may be a strong incentive for Cunard to limit expenditure to keep the books balanced. So perhaps is unlikely we will see any major work to upgrade the internet performance on board at least in the short term.

[ace2542]

I think the hardline internet - the interrnet in the computer room is maybe  circa the days of maybe early broadband going back to maybe 2004 as a state of comparision. Back in 2004 download speeds where 90k a second and we though it was great. Has anyone actually tried to download anything on the cunard internet not stream something but download a big file like a 400 meg movie. Does it take 5 minutes for 2 hours?

[Windsurfboy]

Just back from 32 days on Saga's brand new ship. No problem with internet at all. Given it was free for everyone,  would have been used much more than Cunard's expensive or limited free time internet. 

 

Must be difficult to add internet to older ship, let's see if Queen Anne has no problems .

[Se1lad]

I think one of the problems is that now internet is per the day rather than per the second, people leave their devices connected all the time, and ship’s infrastructure is not able to cope with so many connections.

[PORT ROYAL]

7 minutes ago, Se1lad said:

I think one of the problems is that now internet is per the day rather than per the second, people leave their devices connected all the time, and ship’s infrastructure is not able to cope with so many connections.

So true…  Making a poor service even worse.

[ew101]

1 hour ago, Se1lad said:

I think one of the problems is that now internet is per the day rather than per the second, people leave their devices connected all the time, and ship’s infrastructure is not able to cope with so many connections.

I used to design big corporate networks.  Extra devices, mostly idle, are not by themselves a menace.  So if my phone checks email every 10 minutes, vs twice a day, the total number of daily bits downloaded (my messages) from the Internet is roughly the same.   On the other hand, if we all fire up a webcam viewer or movie,  that adds up and fills the limited capacity right away.  Or yes, if the twice a day peek at Facebook becomes an 18 hour a day live thing, that all uses bits. 

 

There is a technology, "quality of service" - which divides traffic and users into classes - rather like Grills vs steerage aboard.  The idea is everybody gets a little bandwidth (enough to download your mail- eventually), but those paying extra (or the ship's weather photos) get a priority.   The ship Wi-Fi does not much care, the scarcity is the satellite to cloud link.  And we are all used to free/unlimited at home, which cannot be replicated at sea.   

Edited July 11, 2022 by ew101

[ballroom-cruisers]

Good description of how demand relates to capacity.  The limitation of the same kind at a smaller scale happens even at the home broadband level - say you have a connection with a download speed of 50 Mbps - and you start a laptop update which uses most of it.  Another family member then wants to look at a Youtube video on their tablet, and another family member turns on the TV and wants to watch the Wimbledon tennis final in UHD. Something has to give way, and probably the high definition TV stream will take priority or it will stutter.  Now scale that up, and say a few hundred passengers want to watch a video sent on WhatsApp showing the morning fun  of their grandchild eating ice cream, and others want to upload the latest photos from the last trip ashore.  I don't know the uplink/downlink maximum speed available to the satellite from the ship, but I bet that would be problematic, les alone the intranet capacity of the ship's ethernet cabling and switches, and wireless capacity over the whole set of access points around the ship.  Providing an 'upgraded' service without the upgraded hardware capacity and available satellite link cannot work properly unless the system as a whole is designed and managed to deal with expected throughput. I am sure ew101 is aware of all these issues, and it would certainly be nice to hear from one of the Cunard's IT engineers what the real state of the whole system actually is and where the bottlenecks are.  It would seem that passengers are largely reporting symptoms of a system that is being used beyond its limits.  There will be times when less people are on the system, and those fewer people will then get a better performance from it. Yes, sending occasional email or text-only messages uses very few 'bits' but make that images, it gets more, and make that video and it gets a great deal more!

 

Not many years ago we would pack the cases, and phone the kids, parents and friends to say we would be away at sea and out of contact till we got back, and give them the maritime emergency phone details to they could 'phone' the ship to pass emergency messages if a dire need arose, but other than that there would be no communication, no daily status updates, and no pictures whilst away. Times have certainly changed!

Edited July 11, 2022 by ballroom-cruisers
Added paragraph

[PORT ROYAL]

Interesting posts.  
It appears the only resolution to the current Cunard Internet woes would be for the “purchase” system to revert back to the per minute use/pay.

But Cunard would only consider to do this if complaints reach saturation point at GS or the whole system collapsed.  
One now will do one’s bit.  
On the QM for Canada in September and one used to send the occasional email and photographs to friends and family as requested.  But from now on it will be sending regular mega videos and downloads to deliberately assist in draining the system.  Who will join in?

 

[ew101]

47 minutes ago, PORT ROYAL said:

Interesting posts.  
It appears the only resolution to the current Cunard Internet woes would be for the “purchase” system to revert back to the per minute use/pay.

But Cunard would only consider to do this if complaints reach saturation point at GS or the whole system collapsed.  
One now will do one’s bit.  
On the QM for Canada in September and one used to send the occasional email and photographs to friends and family as requested.  But from now on it will be sending regular mega videos and downloads to deliberately assist in draining the system.  Who will join in?

 

This seems drastic.  It does beg the question - maybe Hattie knows - do we have a "back channel" into Cunard HQ- maybe a gentle poke would be good on this.  

 

On Norwegian, known for smoky lobbies on newer ships- they did have an excellent system.  There was a "Dear Hotel Director" box in Reception, a stack of cards and a pencil.  If a staff member was rude or could not mix a martini, or the dish room was overflowing into the hallway, you drop in a card, an hour later your phone would ring and a bottle of bubbly appeared on your desk.  A nice closed loop feedback system.  

[exlondoner]

1 hour ago, PORT ROYAL said:

Interesting posts.  
It appears the only resolution to the current Cunard Internet woes would be for the “purchase” system to revert back to the per minute use/pay.

But Cunard would only consider to do this if complaints reach saturation point at GS or the whole system collapsed.  
One now will do one’s bit.  
On the QM for Canada in September and one used to send the occasional email and photographs to friends and family as requested.  But from now on it will be sending regular mega videos and downloads to deliberately assist in draining the system.  Who will join in?

 

 

Perhaps it would be preferable to try and find a method that didn't deliberately make the lives of your fellow passengers a little more inconvenient.

[PORT ROYAL]

3 minutes ago, exlondoner said:

 

Perhaps it would be preferable to try and find a method that didn't deliberately make the lives of your fellow passengers a little more inconvenient.

Fair point.

What method would be an alternative excellent suggestion to ensure Cunard sits up and takes notice?

[Host Hattie]

11 minutes ago, ew101 said:

This seems drastic.  It does beg the question - maybe Hattie knows - do we have a "back channel" into Cunard HQ- maybe a gentle poke would be good on this.  

No idea, I don't have any inside information.