Celebrity Starlink Wi-Fi Internet (3 Mbps at $1,000 per month)

Ten years ago, I reported on receiving 3 Mbps Internet service while eating six meals per day: Royal Caribbean Voom Internet service review: now you can live and work on a cruise ship.

How much better is cruise ship Internet a decade later if it uses Starlink and brags are using Starlink?

The bad old days of 3.36 Mbps downloads for $18 per device per day are gone. Celebrity was charging about $31 per day for 3.53 Mbps of what they call “Wi-Fi”. Actual Wi-Fi access was free, but it worked only for the Celebrity app and for iMessage.

(Customers using Starlink-based Wi-Fi on United Airlines report download speeds of roughly 400 Mbps and upload of 40 Mbps, i.e., 100X faster download than what Celebrity offers. United’s pricing so far seems to be $0 (free to MileagePlus members, but anyone can join MileagePlus).)

How did it work? WiFi coverage throughout the ship was excellent, but not perfect. A FaceTime call would often get interrupted due to a weak connection, for example. Some of my phone apps barely worked due to, I assume, the sluggish speed. Dropbox, for example, had a lot of trouble syncing photos and was very slow (maybe an hour to upload 50 or 100 images from a day in port) when it did work. A lot of sites and services were painfully slow to load, probably just because 3.5 Mbps was a much better fit for 2016 sites and apps than it is or 2026 sites and apps.

It was fairly easy to bounce a single connection from one device to another.

Let’s look at the economics. Celebrity is charging roughly $1,000 per month. Starlink sells a residential 200 Mbps plan or $80 per month with “unlimited data”. Let’s ignore that the typical customer connects multiple devices to this plan. Starlink’s retail price is 40 cents per month per Mbps of service. Celebrity is charging $283 per month per Mbps of service, a markup of more than 700X or 70,000%.

Note to Elon: Maybe prevent customers from branding an Internet service “Starlink” unless it is provisioned to at least 20 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up. Otherwise, the Starlink brand is being tarnished.

Summary: Celebrity Wi-Fi is good enough for some basic communication, but not good enough that you could live on the ship and do a remote job (Club Med Miches in the Dominican Republic was at 118 Mbps down and 196 Mbps up and we indeed found a French guy who was digital nomad-ing it from Club Med with occasional returns to his base in tax-free Dubai).