WiFi & Blocking Corporate VPNs - Seeking Update

[A Lifes Journeys]

Based on my search, this is a subject that hasn't been updated in at least 6 months.  Is Princess still blocking access to all or certain types of VPNs?  I have a few cruises coming up and must use a corporate VPN to access our company network from my laptop.  On my last few cruises, I wasn't able to gain access and had to get by doing what I could on my phone, which isn't very pleasant when reviewing and editing large documents.  If access is still blocked on the ship, I won't be able to do the work I need to do, and will have to figure out a work around (which I hope doesn't involve cancelling the cruise).

 

I hope that somebody can give me comfort that Princess has become more enlightened and realizes that there are passengers that are employed by major companies that are serious about network security and that need to work while on a cruise.

 

Thanks.

[travelers07]

Currently on Island Princess. Mine is not a corporate vpn but it is well known- Private Internet Access or PIA.

 

I have not been able to use it on other Princess ships, at least not reliably. But Island just changed to StarLink this week and my vpn is staying on very nicely. The speed does not seem too fast but I have been streaming the news live and it is working fine. Hope this doesn’t jinx it! 

[david63]

On Sky the other week, which is now using Skylink, I was unable to access anything when my VPN was enabled - disabled it and access was possible. As my VPN was not critical then, for me, it was not a problem.

 

I would suggest that you contact Princess and try to get a definitive answer and/or a solution.

[afurman]

I'm not sure it matters on who is providing the internet.  My felling is their QOS settings when the ship's internet is full is not prioritizing VPN and it's not getting the bandwidth like other services get.  I was on Emerald last December and pinging google.com was at 350ms, pinging a VPN I use to access internal stuff not on the internet was over 2000MS and if we take into account the latency from where the traffic was dropped off in the US to where my VPN goes maybe add another 40ms so I really think they don't want VPN used since they want to see what is happening on their network.  Now when the ship's internet wasn't full (port day) VPN worked just fine.  I tried to have a chat about this with the Internet Manager his answer to me was VPN is heavy resource against the CPU on your device which is what causes the latency to be so high.  I tried to call him out on his answer but he wasn't having it but I guess no use for someone who understands how this works to talk to someone who has standard replies for most people.  Royal Caribbean on some ships are blocking VPNs and other ships they aren't.  They claim the reason why they block VPN is because someone took down their entire internet due to a VPN so because of that it's blocked fleet wide I was told but it's not fleet wide it's just some ships.

 

This whole situation sucks in the end since you don't know what you are going to get and we all have work to do at some point even on vacation 😞.

 

If you want a trick not sure this will always work but it's also something they can't really play with is to use a IKEv2 VPN.  The reason they can't play too much with it is because that is what the cell carriers use to make wifi calling work so if they don't want to break wifi calling they won't be playing too much with that type of VPN, also would be very difficult for them to maintain a list of carriers and IP's utilized by them for those VPN's.

[Marauder]

Hmm. On my Sapphire princess cruise to Hawaii last November, I had no problem connecting to my work VPN.  I logged in every day both from my work laptop and my phone.  I'm planning on doing the same on my upcoming Emerald princess cruise.  I hope it still works.  It will be a pretty big problem for me if it doesn't.

[A Lifes Journeys]

Thanks for the responses.  Neither my wife nor I have been able to connect to our work VPNs. Our last cruise was February on Ruby.  I'm trying to get answers from Princess and if I do, I will share them here.  Sadly, if the cruise lines are going to make it difficult or unreliable to access a VPN and network with bank level security, we might have to rethink our cruise plans.  The need to be able to respond and deal with critical issues at any time is a downside to our chosen career paths.  I will also check with my IT team to see if they have any words of wisdom and will share those as well.

[SCX22]

The new MedallionNet instructions given through the app state to "Disable Private Wi-fi Address" and to "Disable Limit IP Address Tracking."  Both these functions are two of what VPNs were designed to block.

 

Whenever I had to work remotely while on a cruise, I've had to wait to get into port and find strong wi-fi at the cruise terminal (if there is one) or a cafe to access my work VPN.

[travelers07]

As I posted earlier, I am on Island Princess with StarLink. We were deep in a fjord in Norway today and lost live tv. But I had Wi-Fi with my PIA vpn all day. Heading further north now so hoping for the best. We were north of Bergen today surrounded by tall mountains in Olden.