> curious why they don’t just install Starlink to cut costs
Cruise ships are tiny cities. The density overloads Starlink.
Cruise ships are tiny cities. The density overloads Starlink.
With 5000 people on a ship, that's enough bandwidth for half of them to watch HD video at the same time.
On land they want to spread out the bandwidth as much as possible, but on the ocean most cells are empty or only need a time share fraction of a beam, so they might as well focus on those mini cities.
Source for this capability?
Beams are 250MHz wide and they have 2GHz of allocation.
Hence why they meter and ration its access. Starlink cannot service an entire cruise ship at acceptable speeds for the same reason it can't service a Manhattan city block.