> Honestly this person probably felt they were truly sticking it to the big guy because how dare they charge for internet.
I get the vibe, though I agree this was an unproductive way to pursue it.
I strongly suspect the fee for access is not at all related to the cost to provide service; they’re leveraging the temporary monopoly on connectivity they have to get consumers to pay absurd prices. Cruise ships are similar; I think it was double digits per day for internet.
I don’t think it’s productive to metaphorically “take the ball and go home”, but that instinct would probably be much lower if the fees for access were something reasonable.
The highest tier with a price on it is burstable 8x4Mbps with guaranteed 1x0.5Mbps for $9k a month, which feels about right for a ferry (especially with some aggressive caching). They would break even with 30 customers paying $10 for access, though really I would be surprised if a ferry went far enough out to sea to need specialized internet (I am out of my depth, though, so maybe they do).
All in all, interesting. The markups still feel high, but not nearly as outlandish as I would have thought.
I wonder if at huge economies of scale you can get cheaper marine satellite internet if you don’t need full-ocean coverage. Eg cruise ships seem to sail the same routes on repeat, they don’t really need coverage of the entire ocean. I wonder if Royal Caribbean et al get cheaper service because they have pretty static and pre-defined routes, making it easier for the satellite provider to ensure there are satellites overhead when the ships are there.
These are uncapped prices? Pretty cheap compared to what I was looking at a few years ago. Back then a lot of plans had data caps, it would be like $9k for only several gigs of data all things said and done. You'd pay link speed separate from your data allotment, so a few grand for the connection speed and a few grand for a bucket of data.
They are uncapped as far as I could find, but I didn’t read the fine print or anything.
On the 4 or so companies I checked, most were metered as you said but also clearly designed for personal vessels. They were also expensive as you said; I think the cheapest I saw was ~$1500/month for 5GB, and $0.39/MB for overages.
I am in no way an expert, this is just based off like 4 links. Someone said Inmarsat had more commercial-vessel sized plans so I checked them out, and they do seem way cheaper if you’re planning to use the link a lot.
They are competing like it or not with starlink 100Mb 1TB of usage in the middle of the ocean, unlimited usage near land (within about 5-15 miles) for ~$800 a month.
In that context it's a rip off, and higher latency/lower speed.
