[ih] Internet at Sea

[Jack Haverty]

Michael's suggestion of near-port traffic increasing with people 
planning their shore time sounds reasonable to me.  There's a lot of 
possible "social" influences on traffic patterns.   I remember there was 
one net we installed (for a credit card processor IIRC) where it was 
possible to see such effects - e.g., bursts of traffic during ad breaks 
in the Super Bowl.

I'm curious about the history preceding today's world.  Back in the 
early 1980s, the Internet reached a "cruise ship", possibly the first 
such maritime connection on the Internet.  The ship involved was the USS 
Carl Vinson - the huge aircraft carrier that the US Navy used as a 
testbed for new technology "in the field."   The project was called 
MATNET - Mobile Access Terminal Network, with nodes on shore and on the 
ship.  The technology was a derivative of SATNET - the satellite network 
with linked the US and Europe over Intelsat-IV.   IIRC, MATNET used 
FLTSATCOM satellite resources.

MATNET was the next step in the "pipeline" from research to operational 
use within the US (and probably others such as UK) Navy.  Various Packet 
Radio projects filled a similar pipeline for terrestrial use in the 
Army.   I'm not sure but I think another set of projects involved the 
Air Force; I recall one meeting at SAC HQ in Nebraska to work out some 
logistics for a testbed involving air assets, including the Looking 
Glass.   The vision extended to some future combination of Packet Radio 
and Satellite technologies, i.e., "Packet Radio in the Sky", with 
terrestrial nodes talking to an overhead satellite, and satellites 
talking to each other to get datagrams to their destinations.

Some information about MATNET is here:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA122596.pdf
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA222356.pdf

Now that we have systems like Starlink, it seeme we may now have "Packet 
Radio in the Sky" -- but I don't know the details of how Starlink 
actually works.

So, my question for History is "How did we get from MATNET and Packet 
Radio to the Internet systems that are operational today?"

E.g., did MATNET and/or Packet Radio have any influence on today's 
technology?   How did that happen?  Perhaps the protocols and/or 
algorithms migrated and ended up in today's systems?  Perhaps the people 
involved migrated and took their experiences with them?   Or perhaps 
today's systems were built by a new generation who never even heard of 
those systems from the 1980s?

BBN reorganized (frequently) and I lost contact with the research work 
after mid-1983.   I know how the ARPANET migrated to become the DDN.   
And TCP/IP which annihilated all of its competitors.   But Packet 
Radio?   MATNET?

Anybody know what happened to the other networking technologies that 
ARPA drove into pipelines to field deployment, and what happened after 
those testbeds?   How much of today's Internet technology (such as 
Starlink) contains ARPA DNA?

/Jack Haverty

PS - It occurred to me that Detectives "follow the money" to investigate 
crimes.   Investors "follow the people" to place their bets.  I wonder 
if Internet Historians have to "follow the code".

On 10/3/25 10:26, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
> Some years back (circa 2010?) we also took a cruise and were annoyed 
> by how slow was access to the net.
>
> So we made a video about it:
>
> https://vimeo.com/815203660
>
>         --karl--
>
> On 10/3/25 2:05 AM, Michael Grant via Internet-history 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.  Simply put, the service was awful and expensive 
>> regardless if the ship was in port or not.  It used a geostationary 
>> satellite connection using a dish on a rocker under a ball.  When the 
>> ship moved a lot, the internet stopped working. It was charged by the 
>> minute and you had to connect like dial-up through the ship's captive 
>> web portal and manually disconnect when no longer using it.  In 2010, 
>> iirc, the cost was something like 50 US cents/min and you spent most 
>> of your money waiting.
>>
>> Since then, the geostationary ship internet has gotten much better.  
>> 3 or 4 years ago, I was on a cruise ship which which no longer 
>> charged a per minute charge but still used the similar geostationary 
>> link and you still had to "log on" via a captive portal.  We were 
>> able to have absolutely acceptable video calls part of the time.  I 
>> was amazed because even with the delay through the geo satellite, the 
>> delay was unnoticeable. I had to prove to myself using ping and 
>> traceroute that we were actually using a geostationary link and not 
>> Starlink!
>>
>> In the last year, I have been on cruise ships that now have 
>> Starlink.  They have 12 stationary Starlink pizza box antennae 
>> mounted high up near one of the stacks (6 on each side).  They run 12 
>> separate Starlink connections.  I am going to describe what Cunard 
>> does but I suspect they are all similar.  Cunard runs a VPN which 
>> bonds together the 12 connections such that if any of them goes down 
>> the packet is sent out any antenna.  (I don't know which VPN they use 
>> nor do I know how they bond the links, if it's round-robin or not, 
>> sorry!)  The VPN is terminated in either Southampton UK or Miami 
>> Florida, US depending on where the ship is (they change over midway 
>> across the Atlantic).  They run something like bufferbloat to share 
>> the b/w more fairly.  They also run a firewall where they block quite 
>> a few sites.  I have had to ask them to unblock things which they 
>> have kindly done.
>>
>> I understand that Starlink sets the pricing on the ships and that 
>> they may have installed the system for little or nothing in exchange 
>> for being able to capture that market.  I don't know for sure 
>> though.  I do know a lot of cruise ships are installing Starlink 
>> now.  My only gripe is they charge per device and it's 2x if you want 
>> 2 devices, so for my wife and I, if we both just want to be able to 
>> use whatsapp to find one another on-board, it's well overpriced.  
>> They charge about USD $25/day per device and have a "special" price 
>> where for the cost of 2 devices you can have up to 4.
>>
>> The ships do not disable the satellite internet near ports. They 
>> continue to use the satellite network even in port.  This is likely 
>> because if they were to somehow connect the ship to the port's wifi 
>> they would quickly saturate it.  It's also likely because several of 
>> the ship's systems use their satellite internet and for security 
>> reasons they want that going over their VPN.  I have not noticed much 
>> difference sitting in port using the satellite internet than at sea, 
>> if anything, it's better since many people are off the ship.  I 
>> suspect what Jack may be referring to is when approaching port people 
>> saturate the ship's internet as they prepare to disembark, like doing 
>> research for things to do or coordinating with friends and family and 
>> such.  I have my doubts it has much to do with interference other 
>> than maybe if it's Starlink that the ship starts to compete with 
>> other Starlink users on land using the same space based resource in 
>> the sky.
>>
>> Internet in the cabins has also gotten a lot better over the years.  
>> Cunard has installed Aruba (HP) APs in all the hallways and cabins.  
>> Rather unfortunately one cruise I was on, the wifi in my cabin would 
>> literally seize up.  I spent quite a bit of time tracking it down to 
>> a firmware issue that Aruba had issued a patch for but unfortunately 
>> it was not possible to update the firmware at sea because they would 
>> have had to take the entire ship off-line while they did it so it 
>> would have to wait until next time the ship went in for maintenance.
>>
>> Every cruise ship I have been on in the last 10-15 years also had 
>> separate mobile phone and data available via Maritime 
>> Telecommunications Network (MTN) or other similar companies. This is 
>> only turned on when at sea.  At port, they turn off the maritime 
>> telecom network and you are expected to roam on to the local carrier.
>>
>> I am fairly certain this uses a separate geostationary satellite and 
>> separate dish-on-rocker-in-ball antenna from the internet 
>> connection.   Receiving text messages (SMS) has always been free for 
>> me and that's good because the number of times that's saved me when 
>> on-board and needing to go through some 2FA to get into something has 
>> been plenty.  However, making and receiving calls, sending texts, and 
>> especially using the mobile data is scarily expensive.  I have talked 
>> with plenty of passengers who had no idea and those who had used it 
>> unwittingly on previous cruises only to gotten home to $1000+ phone 
>> bills!  Unfortunately, unless you are a little bit savvy, it's all to 
>> easy to just use it because it works.
>>
>> Ships also seem to have Inmarsat and/or Iridium phones on board but 
>> as far as I am aware this is  not hooked up to some general system 
>> for the public.  It seems like this is backup or ship to shore coms 
>> for the bridge.
>>
>> All of my experience above is solely from my experiences as a 
>> passenger. Everything I know here is just from chatting up tech 
>> people on board ships and my own probing around with tools like ping 
>> and traceroute.  Unfortunately, I never worked in the maritime or 
>> satellite networking industry myself.
>>
>> I'd be interested in hearing some of the technical details if someone 
>> on this list knows more.  It would also be interesting to see a 
>> thread of the history of internet on air crafts if someone knows 
>> about that.
>>
>> Michael Grant

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