Celebrity tarnishes the Starlink brand by advertising “Starlink” and delivering 1990s Internet speeds (see Celebrity Starlink Wi-Fi Internet (3 Mbps at $1,000 per month)). What was it like on Norwegian during a recent Alaska trip (on the Norwegian Joy)? 100 Mbits down and 10 up:
Mid-afternoon on a sea day:
Perhaps they’re throttling uploads to 10 Mbps because it was never fast to upload photos to Dropbox. However, downloads perhaps run at a speed related to the number of users online and active.
Latency means that web pages feel slower even than on our ghetto-class Xfinity cable at home, but the bandwidth is there for streaming addicts.
What if you need to connect an IoT device, old Kindle, or something else for which the Norwegian web-based portal won’t work? A Windows 11 PC is capable of broadcasting a mobile WiFi hotspot to multiple additional devices even with just one WiFi adapter. (This also works for using a laptop and phone at the same time or sharing among family members.)
Separately, Norwegian might be the ultimate nightmare for a progressive. It was co-founded by an Israeli (Ted Arison, “third-generation sabra” born in Tel Aviv in the “Palestine” days, who later founded Carnival, which also own Cunard, Costa, and a bunch of others, with financing from Israeli-Bostonian Meshulam Riklis). If Jewish-Israeli foundation weren’t bad enough, the modern company was built by private equity (Apollo, founded and run by three American Jews)!
How’s the ship? I’ll cover that in a separate post. Derek Zoolander would probably say that it is suitable for ants and needs to be at least three times bigger.
How we managed to survive vacations before the internet, and cell phones, (and GPS for directions) is beyond me.
So the next time you are on vacation, tell us about the adventures you had and the social justice you experienced, not the Wi-Fi speed. 😄