Why is cruise ship wifi so slow?

Three reasons stack on top of each other, and the cruise line only controls one of them. It comes from space rather than a cable; several thousand people share it; and everybody wants it at the same two times of day.

1. It comes from satellites

There is no cable to a ship. Everything goes up to a satellite and back down, which historically added a delay of half a second or more before anything else happened — the thing that made video calls so awkward.

This is the part that has genuinely improved. Low-orbit services sit a few hundred kilometres up instead of 36,000, and the delay drops to something like normal broadband. What that changed, and what it did not.

2. Several thousand people share it

A big ship is a small town on one connection. Your package does not buy you a private line; it buys you access to a shared one.

This is why a dearer tier often disappoints. It can raise your own limits, but it cannot manufacture capacity that is not there. On a congested evening, premium and basic both feel slow.

3. Demand is wildly uneven

Everyone is ashore in port and back aboard in the evening, so usage swings hard.

• Fastest: early morning, and daytime in port.
• Slowest: evenings, and all day on a sea day.

If you have something that needs to go through — uploading photos, a work call — doing it at seven in the morning is the single most effective thing on this page, and it is free.

What makes it worse for everybody

Video, photo backup and app updates. Not because they are forbidden, but because they are enormous compared with everything else. A family group sending holiday pictures over a shared satellite link is quietly taking the capacity other people are trying to read email with.

Turning off automatic photo backup and app updates before you sail is worth doing for your own sake as well as everyone else's.

What not to bother with

Searches for speeding up cruise wifi turn up VPNs, DNS changes and portal tricks. None of them create bandwidth. A VPN usually makes things slower, because it adds another hop to a connection whose problem is already distance and congestion.

The thing that does not need the connection at all

Most of what people want the wifi for onboard is "where are you" and "we're at the bar". CruiseLink does that without touching the ship's internet — messages pass straight between the phones in your group over Bluetooth and the local network, free, in airplane mode.

It is unaffected by how congested the satellite link is, which on a sea day at eight in the evening is the entire point. It reaches only your own group, everyone needs it installed before sailing, and a message travels when phones come near enough rather than instantly across the ship.

Get CruiseLink

Free, no account, nothing to set up beyond your group. On iPhone and Android, and the two work together.