Maersk has wifi, quality varies from ship to ship and then eventually they clamped down on data. Some crew complained saying just checking that bills were paid online ate up all their data in one shot. Supposedly on one ship the second mate sent the same (unanswered) email daily Andy Dufresne style to the shoreside IT guys until one of them relented and shut off the data limit.
That kind of fuckery pisses off the folks afloat who don’t have the same luxuries as the office weenies.
. Maersk only made 61 Billion USD in 2021. If they provided unlimited wifi for all their ships the profit would have been only maybe 60.99 billion more or less. People forget how much one billions dollars is. It is one thousand million dollars. If you made $200,000 a year you’d have to work for 5000 years to make that much money.
I think if I had a company claiming a profit of 61 Billion dollars in one year I would be able to provide the people working on my ships with some really good internet.Unless of course I didn’t give a damn about the people that ran my ships.
It’s already a pretty moot point with the Starlink for RV service if you know how.
Does that work everywhere in the ocean though?
I only ask because I know DirectTV shuts off about a day off of the US Coast.
Technically yes, in practice no unless you know how.
Starlink maritime will be out soon but probably at a much higher rate.
I recently read an article that said Starlink for commercial ships and big yachts will be available soon. $10,000 for the equipment, plus a $5000 a month subscription.
Speaking of internet. Gcaptain and Discourse are bandwidth hogs. I can rarely get enough bandwidth to logon.
That actually sounds pretty inexpensive, but it really depends on the data allotment you get for that $5k.
There was a Danish vessel manager assigned to a handful of the US flag ships in the fleet who made that clear many times — especially about the American crews.
So I shed no tears making Big Blue pay extra for anything. Ever.
that “captains first mate” add looked pathetic !! good grief !!, WiFi aboard is good But personally i’d avoid TV, (especially the adds), a person can improve reading books and the phone shouldn’t be on the bridge or in the engine room. North of around 60 degrees the reception was pretty spotty anyway and having the bank account open was problematic … better to pay someone ashore to handle that while your gone.
It’s just how the world works now. It’s expected that you’re reachable, even at sea.
I can attest that star-link on board is bad ass. 30+ crew members with multiple TVs streaming, laptops, Xbox’s, and still blazing fast internet.
What type of commercial vessel are you on that has starlink? I’m just curious who the early adopters are in the commercial industry.
Space X vessels 
Well that computes…
Good wifi and TV on ships can create problems if there is not good sound proofing between cabins. People making calls from their cabins can disrupt the sleep of crew in the cabin next to them.
Well, that isn’t any different than someone blasting their music. . . .
Or other things…
Yeah thats a shitty shipmate problem not a TV/WiFi problem
Yes you are right, but there are a lot of shitty shipmates out there unfortunately.
It’s also a shitty ship design problem, when many older vessels were designed it was just not a consideration that every crew member would be able to make phone calls from their cabin at any time.
It didn’t matter that there was poor sound proofing between cabins because people just couldn’t make calls. Now that people can make calls whenever they want it is creating social problems on vessels that just didn’t happen before.
Many modern vessels have cabins designed to a certain ‘comfort class’ set by the classification society and have great sound proofing between cabins so you can hardly hear people making calls, but on older vessels with poor sound proofing you can literally hear people in the next cabin snort or fart through the bulkhead.
Yeah, I’m well aware of thin bulkheads and noisy neighbors. The only phone calls I’ve ever heard were years ago before wifi when we were close enough to shore to get cell phone service.