What cell phone service works in the eastern carribean on a cruise ship?

Question

name of ship Mariner of Seas, Royal carribean

Answer 1

I think AT&T or Sprint should work. If you are looking to work in the Caribbean especially US Virgin Islands then visit http:www.career.vi.

Answer 2

Cell phones charges are astronomical from there....check the rates with your cell phone company. We did a cruise to Mexico recently and lots of people said the charges were outrageous.

Answer 3

i live on crooked island in the bahamas. the only cell phone carriers that work here are at&t and sprint. i have a verizon but it stopped working once i left nassau. you could also look into renting a global phone if you are with a different carrier already, but it can be expensive. hope you have fun on your trip!

Answer 4

Pretty much everyone in the Caribbean that goes out to sea and wants to remain in constant communication uses those Satellite Phones...

Namely by Iridium...

http://www.Iridium.com/

Their phones costs BIG bucks though and they bill like $1-$3 (by the minute) though....

Outside of that..... The Caribbean mobile break down is pretty much this...  The Eastern Caribbean is pretty much only GSM type phones...  (Which are like AT&T, T-Mobile, etc...)

The Sprint, Alltel & Verizon or "CDMA" type phones wont work in the Eastern Caribbean because the CDMA standard is a US corporate owned standard....  Thus you have to pay royalties just to build and run a cell phone network on the CDMA standard...

The GSM standard in the Eastern Caribbean is also mostly North American frequencies, ( 850 & 1900 MHz ) not the European ones ( 900 & 1800 MHz )...  

NOTE-- I donno about the British/Dutch/French territories though they may have other unknown carriers I don't know about.

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In the French territories they have France Telecom's mobile company "Orange" as their main provider....

http://www.orange.com/

Orange also provides in Dom. Rep. and Haiti....

Nextel / SouthernLinc / Boost Mobile phones use the iDEN standard which was made by Motorola...  As far as I know that will NOT work in the Eastern Caribbean.... The only islands that possibly have it are the Dom. Rep. and Puerto Rico....

The main mobile carrier in the English speaking Caribbean is  Irish-owned Digicel -- http://www.digicelgroup.com/

Their main competition is British-based Cable & Wireless.... C&W's mobile phone brand is called Bmobile -- http://www.cwbmobile.com/

Both of the above use GSM...  But as you may or may not know cell phone towers work by line of sight....  They wont work over ~ 6 miles.. So once you sail over 3 miles or so out to sea your cell phone call is going to start to get bad...  US mobile companies have to place mobile towers like every 6 miles apart so that they will hand off a call to one another so once you get 3 miles out to sea your phone calls are going to get spotty.  

Some ships I think have their own cell phone towers ("Repeaters" as they're called) on them which up/downlink to satellites but you have to becareful because they can charge you whatever they want as mobile "roaming" fees to your cell phoen carrier. I would check first before even powering on my mobile on the ship...

Also note... In order for your mobile to work in the Caribbean you might need to call your cell phone company and make sure they have "International Roaming" activated on your mobile account...  Usually they have to do a credit check for this and it can take upto 3-4 days for it to be approved so you may need to do that before you go on your trip...

NOTE though cell phones on ships may charge like $2-$3 a minute too.

Answer 5

When we were on the Freedom of the Sea's RC everyone was on their phone.  It worked in the rooms, everywhere.  I had heard that they had done something on board to enhance the signal.  But talk fast cause when we got home we had  7 minutes of calls and it was 35.00!  This was with T-Mobile I think.  We now have Sprint and I don't think we used the phone on board again.  We learned our lesson!

Answer 6

You will need a satellite phone, not a cell phone, if you want to maintain contact all the way through.  You will spend a lot of time out of cell range of land.