It's interesting to contrast Starlink on airlines vs Starlink on cruises.
AFAICT, all the airlines rolling out Starlink have made it free on their flights. Which implies cooperation from Starlink -- either Starlink has made "free" a condition of their service, or they've just priced it cheap enough to make free a reasonable option for airlines.
There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced significantly higher than on airlines. So either the cruise lines or Starlink are gouging. Or both. Probably both.
> There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced significantly higher than on airlines.
There's a technical reason for the case of airlines flying over land. Over land, the connection is just up to satellite and down to a ground station.
Over open ocean (whether airborne or on a ship), Starlink has to use their inter-satellite laser hops to eventually get to a ground station. I don't know for sure that Starlink charges more for this mode but if I ran the company I certainly would because those lasers are a limited resource.
Planes, at most, have a couple hundred people onboard.
Cruise ships are getting towards the 10k person mark.
One cruise ship will be substantially more load on the local satellites and ground station than a plane will.
The bandwidth of a single starlink terminal is going to be saturated at airplane capacity anyway. The extra number of people on a cruise ship just means service degradation, not excess bandwidth consumption.
The price difference is just based on what the market will bear. Trapped on a cruise for a week, you are much more desperate for Internet. Plus you've paid a lot more for the trip and the fee doesn't feel so large compared to all the other upsells. The cruise often is the vacation, whereas air travel is just the means to an end.
> The extra number of people on a cruise ship just means service degradation, not excess bandwidth consumption.
Which is resolved by charging, a lot, so there's enough bandwidth per active paying person.
Yeah, but there is a limit to the price the market will bear. At 10k users and assuming a single terminal, and a single price, you are going to not going to be able to price it so as to optimize price vs performance.
Personally I would have at least 2 terminals, a low tier and high tier. I would sell only a limited number of high tier connections, good for the entire trip. Probably included as a perk with first-class cabins. The low tier would be a daily purchase. I mean hotels have done this for ages.
Maybe a dedicated business center with wired (dongle) connection and kiosk PCs, that gets the best bandwidth of all, but you're away from ship activities.
A cruise ship shouldn’t have any issues with having 10 or 20 terminals installed and the clear skies in all directions could mean each has its own bird.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1crxkx9/starlink_...
Apparently a mid-size ship will have 12 terminals. That same thread talks about other ship sizes but not if they have more terminals.
I still submit that the pricing is entirely a function of what the market will bear, and not the cost of the service.
Those 12 terminals still need to talk to satellites. Only a certain number will be in reach, and if the ship is significantly out to sea, those satellites will need to pass data along to others to reach the ground.
We know a densely populated land area can saturate the satellites overhead; it's part of the reason we don't use Starlink in, say, NYC. The same math applies to a thousand cruise ship passengers trying to use it at the same time.
(It will absolutely be much better than the previous state-of-the-art, though.)
Absolutely the density of 12 terminals over what amounts to skyscraper on edge, is high. But cruise ships are not packed into city blocks. The density of terminals over ship-in-ocean sized areas is quite low. The density is very much more sparse than a countryside or farm area. So it feels unlikely to me that you are going to saturate the visible satellites. And those satellites will be very underutilized at their locations not quite over land yet.
Only recently (2025) has Starlink been documented to pass data between satellites and only for new ones. Cruise ships have had starlink for several years so the most common case will likely still be a single hop. Most cruises hug closely enough to the shore (within 100 miles) that a second hop isn't required.
It's not really a thousand passengers, it's just 12 terminals. Sure, those terminals are well oversubscribed vs a normal user terminal, but given the documented terminal-to-ground-station ratio (quite high), I'm pretty doubtful a cruise ship or 2 significantly impacts (or is impacted by) ground bandwidth. The density of users is just at the wrong scale for it to be significant.
I’d guess that concurrent demand would be lower on a plane. A cruise ship has people with nothing to do wandering around, presumably screwing around on the internet being one of them.
> A cruise ship has people with nothing to do wandering around
The major point of a cruise is that there is constantly something to do. It's wall-to-wall entertainment, 24-hours a day.
My 2-year-old was too excited to sleep on a Disney cruise, so we just walked around and found character photos at 10PM. She was too shy to take her picture, so I got my picture taken with her hiding her face on my shoulder.
(FWIW: A cruise is also the kind of vacation that you need to bring some offline entertainment with you. I caught up on reading when I had to stay in the cabin with a sick child.)
Cruises sound and look like absolute nightmares. Physical manifestation of brainrot. Cyberpunk hell
I can't stand them, myself. There's also tons of really good food. You need a forklift to disembark.
I'm a die-hard nerd.
My vision of hell, is a Caribbean beach, mid-80s, warm breeze, clear water, and no internet access.
Really, the worst thing about a cruise is that there's a good chance you're going to get sick.
After that, it's more about your attitude.
Cruises make most of their money now by upselling you on board. Premium drinks and drink cards, more premium restaurants while included buffet and dining room get less love; internet upgrade, excursions, lots of stores selling stuff like diamonds and overpriced fashion, art auctions. It's worse than a floating shopping mall.
Almost, the reason it's free is because competition from t-mobile for the internet provider and that the legacies are providing it free and well almost legacy airlines like southwest and alaska.
Whatever one legacy does, the other do - charge bag fees, the others do too within a quarter. Free internet (Delta afaik was the leader here) the others offer free internet.
Soon it will go the way of having an added fee or being tied to your ticket on the airline, w/ Tmobile its already linked to your phone number.
There is one very good reason: Supply and demand.
Most people will manage without internet for a couple of hours.
A cruise takes much longer.
Being away from the internet for a week is settling point imo. I hope they keep the price high so I won't cave in and buy it.
Were these airplanes over land or see, OOC?
IIRC Starlink gets more expensive when you need to route satellite-to-satellite rather than straight back to a ground station.
It seems as it would average out, but I wonder if the equation between "<some %age of> ~2500 people for a 7-14 days" vs. "<some %age of> ~175 people for 2-5 hours" incurs more "costs" for the former?
it's unclear to me why Starlink is free on airlines. I currently pay $30-50 per transoceanic flight for crappy internet. I'd pay 2-3X more for something solid with lower latency.