Princess Cruises, a brand of the Carnival Corporation, will become the first global cruise ship fleet with early access to SES‘s O3b mPOWER network, offered for its Princess MedallionClass, the company announced Monday. The company says that Princess MedallionClass will be fully active on 11 ships by the end of 2020, with a new ship activated every 60 days. 

Carnival Corporation’s Global Experience and Innovation unit is giving SES status as its Premier Innovation Partner through 2023, with SES as a fully-integrated development partner of unit spanning design, creation and delivery for connected guest experience innovations, technical platform development, intelligence, and hybrid cloud and edge compute enablement. The SES brand will also be incorporated into the OceanMedallion.  

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Princess said that O3b mPOWER will ensure that its MedallionClass Ships are not constrained by traditional bandwidth capacity plans. SES will keep bandwidth ahead of demand with multi-Gbps capacity whenever and wherever needed. To date, SES and Princess have collaborated on WiFi at sea MedallionNet, which has been available to the Princess feet since 2017.

“The future is now with real solutions and proven technology delivering real experiences to floating smart cities around the globe powering a coveted experience. SES integration into the Global Experience and Innovation team not only provides world-leading connectivity technology and fueling OceanMedallion capabilities, but most importantly provides expertise that is passionate about creating amazing experiences through the fusion of creativity, story, connectivity and media across the world,” said John Padgett, chief experience and innovation officer for Carnival Corporation. “Our first joint creation, MedallionNet, has significantly elevated the cruise experience for our guests and crew, but more importantly stimulated the creation of leading-edge, cloud-based edge compute models that were previously considered impossible.”