Cruise ship - Vonage plus WiFi = communication home?

Question

My husband signed up for Vonage and got a wireless card for my laptop. Between the two at a WiFi we were able to call Mexico, and other places. Supposedly, the Grand Princess cruise ship we are going on from April 7th to 13th has an Internet Cafe. He is assuming he can pay for use of their internet connection and use our laptop and Vonage and call his workers back in Texas and they can call and leave voicemails for him. Works here - but does it work on a cruise ship?

Answer 1

VoIP needs a relatively fast connection in order to provide an understanible connection.  I use Vonage and when we first signed up we were on SDSL because of how far our home was from the central office.  This resulted in high latency and when we pinged vonage from our home we were receiving responses of over 100ms.  Vonage says that they will work with 200ms latency, but the reception is poor and often unintelegable.

Since a cruise line gets it's internet connection from satellite the chances of the latency being under 200ms is extreamly low.  It will probably be closer to 500-700ms.  So using the connection for live calls is most likely out of the question.

He would be able to get his voice mails though because those are downloaded as full files and can be played at any time.

The biggest drawback is the price, it is 50cents a minute on most of the cruise lines for internet, although you can get packages up to unlimited service for $100 for a week.  That's cheaper then ship to shore phone service.

His best bet though is to make calls using his cell phone when your in or near port.  The Grand Princess has started provided Cellular@Sea, which will allow your husband to send & receive calls on ship via his cell phone.  Unfortunately this service is not part of your normal cellular service and will be billed at a premium, but it may be cheaper then ship to shore (For Sprint it is $2.99 a minute and text messaging is not available).  If he wants to avoid those additional charges when he goes to use his cell he needs to check and see if it says Cellular@Sea.  The ships turn off the service when they pull into port.

Answer 2

Find out at below link. A very good informative site on all cruise liners.

Answer 3

Hi,

The Grand has an Internet cafe, and you can use your lap top in the aitrum by the pursers desk they have WIFI there.  With regards to phone calls, this can be very very expensive. but as soon as you get on board go straight to the Pursers desk and ask them, that way you can call on your mobile to your collegues, and give them the phone number to call the ship....... sometimes you do even get mobile phone connection in the different ports of call.

Answer 4

It might, but it probably won't work well.

The internet connection on the ship is via satellite.  It's not a broadband connection, speeds are typically slightly faster than your average dial up connection.  Vonage or any other VOIP service really needs a broadband connection for best results.

For live calls it would probably not work very well... You'll have better luck listening to voicemails, but it will probably take a while to download those voicemails.