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.