Hi, since it has been 15 years since my last deep sea vessel i was wondering if the internet is available underway like it is on a cruise ship? I.E. Skype, AOL IM, etc… Is it commonplace for most ships to have this available for the crew? Thanks
don’t know about the deep sea shipping, but many coastal towing companies have internet in the boat, and some willingly let the crew hop on, to use the internet. some of the coastwise companies use wireless internet, so it is often limited when near coast.
Yes, but usually just limited to email, that other stuff smothers the bandwidth.
And the email is a “store and forward” type of thing. Your outgoing message is appended to the scheduled transfers with the company and your incoming is received the same way. It might be hours before your message goes out and the next day before you get a reply.
Full time real time connections are relatively expensive, almost as much per ship as the board members spend on lunch. A VSAT connection with unlimited data and a couple of VOIP lines costs a yacht around $6k per month on a multi year contract.
And like Jeffrox alluded to, when there are multiple users the system slows down for each user as bandwidth is limited. As it is, it’s not the fastest way to surf.