Norwegian’s Breakaway ship. The cruise line rolled out Starlink across its fleet. Photo: Norweigan Cruise Line

Providing broadband internet access for cruise ship passengers has unleashed an insatiable beast, always hungry for more and more connectivity, satellite providers and cruise operators said last week at SATELLITE.

Cruise passengers will “consume as much as you give them,” said Guillermo Muniz, COO of OmniAccess, a connectivity provider for the cruise and high-end yacht market. Muniz compared the largest cruise ships to cities, with as many as 10,000 passengers.

Smartphones equipped with high-resolution cameras, combined with the cloud-based ‘always on’ culture they created, have massively expanded demand. “You’re talking gigabits of connectivity,” Muniz said.

But providing that connectivity to cruise passengers through the familiar type of Wi-Fi connection similar to what they have at home comes at a cost for cruise operators, Muniz acknowledged.

“Imagine, you’ve got 4,000 iPhones. When you plug them in at night and they’re on Wi-Fi — all the pictures and videos start syncing up to iCloud,” he said.

Cruise operators use network management tools to prioritize different kinds of traffic, said Maikel Miranda, senior director for Network, Voice, and Satellite Services at Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd.

Passengers with premium packages, which include streaming video services, take bandwidth priority. “That traffic is going to have to go first,” he said. Other, lower priority traffic, can be shunted to lower-cost connections with greater latency or packet loss.

Vessels have to be repeatedly retrofitted to meet growing passenger connectivity demands, he said.

“It’s not acceptable that [the Wi-Fi] signal doesn’t cover the balcony,” said Miranda. Passengers complain if they lose a voice call in an elevator.

Muniz said that safety equipment and other regulated communications aside, Starlink and other large Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations are the only way to fulfill all of that demand currently.

“Starlink is winning,” he said. Cruise vessels might have SES’s O3b Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation or legacy Geostationary Orbit (GEO) VSAT connectivity, but only as a backup, supplement or fail-over to Starlink, at least in terms of passenger internet connectivity.

“I have run operations for 10 years,” said Miranda, “I am used to things working when everything fails.”

SES CEO Adel Al-Saleh pushed back at the idea that Starlink is winning the cruise market in the Opening General Session on Tuesday morning. He said that while Starlink gets a lot of attention in the cruise market, SES has also seen continued success. SES connectivity solutions coexist with Starlink on every large cruise line. “We share that market share between the two of us, we’re both growing,” he said.

Panelists noted that Starlink does not offer a conventional enterprise deal, with a service level agreement that guaranteed connectivity. However, that could change soon. SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen said during SATELLITE he believes Starlink is an enterprise-grade service and he is pushing for the service to include guarantees.

Always-on broadband has a different network footprint than conventional connectivity, observed Brad Grady, business development manager for satellite provider Hughes Network Systems.

“It’s more symmetrical,” because of the uploading to the cloud consumers expect, said Grady. “It’s a big network management challenge.”

Passenger expectations for connectivity have “changed out of all recognition,” over the past decade Grady said.

But that could play to the operators’ advantage. Many cruise passengers like to watch live TV, he said, which is traditionally traffic sent via legacy satellites, requiring a significant real estate footprint on the deck. Nowadays, passengers might like to stream their local stations via their phones and watch that on the internet-enabled TVs in their cabins.

“We’re starting to see those second screen experiences,” he said. Which again complicates network management issues.

In an industry that lives and dies by passenger satisfaction ratings, “User experience is really the key driver,” said Grady, rather than technology. “Do you really want all your eggs in one basket?” he asked.

“If somebody pays for a really great Wi-Fi experience, they expect their photos to get uploaded to the cloud,” he said. “No matter what network management or other tools the operators employ, if a passenger is unable to upload, eventually that person is going to go complain to the nearest cruise ship employee and say, ‘Why is my iCloud not working? I want a refund.’”