[ih] Internet at Sea

[Bill Woodcock]

> On Oct 3, 2025, at 11:05, Michael Grant via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> From "Jack Haverty via Internet-history" <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
>> Recently I heard anecdotal reports that the Internet on cruise ships works well - but is reliable only when the ship is far out to sea. When it's in port, or even just approaching port, teleconferencing is unreliable.   My speculation is that traffic loads when near a port include all the land-based users and the network may be overwhelmed.  But that's just speculation, I have no data.
>> 
> I have spent quite a bit of time as passenger on cruise ships these last few years.  I don't know when the Internet started becoming available on cruise ships but I first used it on-board in 2010 on Holland America. 

In 1996, the ISP I was running at the time put the cargo fleets of American President Lines and Neptune Orient Lines on the Internet.  At the time, to the best of anyone involved’s knowledge, they were the first civilian ships that had been connected to the Internet.  Our technical staff were mostly on the west coast of the US, so APL and NOL would have the ships come in to Long Beach, and our techs would do the install, getting off at Oakland if all went well, or Tacoma if they went poorly.  Or Anchorage, in a couple of cases that went really badly.  They all used a 2m gyrostabilized dish in a spherical radome connecting on-demand to Inmarsat at 9600bps when at sea, and NCR WaveLAN radios on sector antennas while in (or near) port.  I can’t remember now how many of the ports we built cells at…  all the major ones on the west coast of North America from Long Beach to Dutch Harbor, and several in Asia; Hong Kong, Busan and Manila, and a bunch in Japan… Okinawa, Fukuoka, and Nagoya, I think.  The main uses were email, database synchronization, and file transfer.  We wrote a UUCP shim for their SQL database synchronization, and then the UUCP ran on-demand over serial while they were at sea, and full-time over TCP as soon as they got close enough to port to pick up signal from our installation there.  The ports were mostly fractional T1 with frame relay back to our PoPs.

All the APL ships were named after, you got it, American presidents, but being California-based, there was a preference for the more liberal presidents.  But in all our systems, we needed unique identifiers for the ships, because they all had static /26s onboard and everything was uniquely addressed…  So we had an AV cart with a big UPS on the bottom shelf that we used to demo new things for them, and it had a little fake prow on the front, and was named the President Nixon.

                                -Bill