Signal
at sea
It’s no small task to keep cruise passengers connected to the Internet. A
signal’s complicated path from ship to satellite, and back again, is costly
for passengers and cruise lines alike. By Donna Tunney
What happens when someone on a cruise ship attempts to
connect with the Internet?
1. The request begins at an Internet cafe computer.
2-3. The signal moves through the ship’s Internet proxy to
its WAN accelerator and then to its router.
4. It is directed to the ship’s antenna.
5. It is beamed to a geostationary satellite 22,000 miles
above the Earth.
6. The signal bounces back to an earth station, which is
operated by MTN Satellite Communications.
7. It hits that station’s WAN accelerator.
8-9. It transfers to an Internet router and finally reaches
the Internet.
The process is then reversed. By the time the signal
returns to the Internet cafe computer, perhaps to display
the homepage of a website, the communication sequence
has traveled some 44,000 miles roundtrip. The data request
signal, according to MTN, travels at the speed of light. It
takes half a second to hit the geostationary satellite in
each direction. That delay, called latency, is not present on
land-based Internet connection systems, and it is one of the
reasons why shipboard connectivity is slower than on land.
