[ih] Internet at Sea

Fri Oct 3 06:29:40 PDT 2025

Since January 2024, Starlink finally implemented FQ-CoDel; thanks to many
great people on this list pushing Elon and the company into it, but most of
them all - thanks to our badly missed Dave Taht:
https://circleid.com/posts/20240311-starlink-has-begun-delivering-promised-latency-cuts

Here is @Larry Press <lpress at csudh.edu>'s experience with Starlink on
cruise ships (Seabourn Venture) from May 2024.

Such a pity we can't share what we see at LibreQoS, helping cruise ships to
make that internet experience on cruise ships even better, but let me tell
you in general that those using LibreQoS, on top of basic FQ-CoDel in
Starlink routers, are able to even better squeeze that performance out of
it and to manage and allocate resources even more tightly.

The biggest scare for such companies is high fees if they use more
bandwidth than allocated, so we are helping with that as well.

All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik

*In loving memory of Dave Täht: *1965-2025

https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik at gmail.com

On Fri, Oct 3, 2025 at 2:01 PM Bill Woodcock via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
>
> > 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
>
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