Recent experience with WIFI on Grandeur? Currently on Wonder and its atrocious.

[JessyCruises]

Has anyone tried to work using the WIFI on Grandeur recently?  If so, how was it?  Particularly asking about audio/video calls over VOIP or Teams/Google Meets.

 

We are are on Wonder for a B2B now and are scheduled to move to the Grandeur on Sunday for a B2B.  We are on a "workation" working M-F during regular business hours. We do workations all of the time on ships and have had no major issues that I can recall, except for the occasional temporary hiccup caused by weather, etc.  We had no qualms about the Wonder with the latest and greatest WIFI but were worried about moving to the Grandeur and potential issues. 

 

Turns out, it is the WIFI on Wonder was what we needed to worry about.  It has basically been unusable for anything other than simple surfing all of last week and today.  Hubby needs to participate on calls daily and I have a few every week and its been impossible. The upload speed is basically 0 so no one can hear us on calls. The Voom desk has been of no help.  We even tried guest services to have them connect us via a phone number to the calls and they could not figure out how to dial a phone #. With the horrible WIFI experience on Wonder, it makes us even more concerned about Grandeur so are hoping there are others who have had some experience on her lately that can offer some insight.

 

We are going to have to seriously consider cancelling Grandeur if the WIFI is going to be as bad as it is currently on Wonder.

 

TIA!!

Edited March 13, 2023 by JessyCruises

[Biker19]

1 minute ago, JessyCruises said:

We are going to have to seriously consider cancelling Grandeur if the WIFI is going to be as bad as it is currently on Wonder.

If internet access is that important, never book a cruise because you are always at the mercy of a lot of things, even beyond RCI's control. Grandeur has Starlink but there's no assurance it will work all the time reliably.

[Mallow]

I had better luck connecting to the ship WIFI with my phone and usb tethering to my laptop to take meetings.  It seemed more reliable than connecting my laptop.  It may be that they have different firewall/throttling in place for certain types of devices.

[SummerBeee]

WiFi on Grandeur was awful in January. She was not running starlink then. 
Hope it works for you

[JessyCruises]

2 minutes ago, Mallow said:

I had better luck connecting to the ship WIFI with my phone and usb tethering to my laptop to take meetings.  It seemed more reliable than connecting my laptop.  It may be that they have different firewall/throttling in place for certain types of devices.

Unfortunately, we experience the same issue when trying to connect on our phones vs laptops

[Biker19]

3 minutes ago, Mallow said:

It may be that they have different firewall/throttling in place for certain types of devices.

They don't - your phone just happened to have a more reliable wifi chipset than the laptop.

[alfaeric]

Not sure this helps, but our recent cruise the Radiance suggests that the core problem isn't starlink as much as it's the wifi routers on the ship.  Once we got connection, the speed was decent, but getting that in our cabin was really tough.  The other indicator was that wifi access when it got crowded in spaces was really, really poor.

 

So everyone using the app at the same time (or at least being connected all of the time) really, really hurts performance.

 

Basically, this means you have a double problem...  

[PhillyFan33579]

I have cruised on Wonder three times this year. My experience has been the WiFi is excellent on port days but not so good on sea days. The more people using WiFi the slower the service. This has been consistent on every RCI ship I have cruised on lately. I think you will have the same issue on Grandeur. Personally I would not go on a cruise if I needed to rely on WiFi for work. 

[Engineroom Snipe]

To this day, I have not subscribed to a cruise Wi-Fi package.

 

Each time I consider it, I remember the first day of almost every cruise. Everyone is trying to get their devices working. There would be a significant line of people waiting at the "On-line" help area. There were multiple employees assisting passengers and troubleshooting problems I then would be in the Windjammer later and overhear some loud frustration about "how something must be wrong" or "why are we paying for this?" as they were trying to surf on their phones. I was not trying to overhear any conversations; people tend to speak with more volume when they get frustrated.

 

Then I read on this board how some ships seem to do very well in general with their Wi-Fi systems. 

 

I am sorry that it did not work out for you.

[Mikamarii]

I cannot speak to any of the technical aspects of how wifi works in general let alone ship to ship. We did a Transpacific cruise on Ovation last October and had the surf and stream. From my state room balcony in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between HAwaii and Tahiti and again between Tahiti and New Zealand I was able to easily stream live hockey games from my balcony. No delay, no cutting out. 

 

Ovation had a cap of 3000k people (due to new cruise passenger laws in French Polynesia) and don’t think it reached that so the ship was around 1/2 capacity and I’m sure not everyone purchased a wifi package.

 

I’ve heard lots of reports about horrible wifi on cruise ships. Likely from full capacity ships sailing in congested Caribbean waters. I can only conclude that the internet is generally good on cruise ships but its limits are based on how many users and how it is being used. I’d assume (especially since covid) more and more people are taking week long cruises in the carribean as workations, video calls and such, completely taxing the system.

 

My opinion only with absolutely no formal knowledge to back it up.