I had high hopes for Starlink at sea, but satellite internet still needs work

They call it the fastest internet at sea — Royal Caribbean’s Starlink-powered Voom service — and I guess that’s true. After all, I don’t think Google is interested in running Fiber to the middle of the water off the Bahamas. Either way, I was excited to try it on a recent cruise, whether I was a captive audience or not. I’d heard nothing but bad things about the Wi-Fi on cruise ships, but most of those complaints were from the pre-Starlink days.

Now, I figured, the situation must be at least slightly better. Surely, the satellite-powered Starlink would boost reliability and speed while I fought for connectivity among 6,000 other people onboard. Maybe it did, but it also showed me quite a few of the remaining flaws with satellite internet. Here’s how my Wi-Fi at sea left me sour.

Speed is one thing, reliability is another

First and foremost, I’m not here to complain about speed — at least, not really. The connection that Starlink offered while away from shore was… fine. It wasn’t great, but I could stay connected to social media and edit and upload photos as needed. And when the alternative was having Verizon try to charge me each day, the 10 to 15mbps that Starlink achieved was fine.

The problem, however, is that, in my experience, Voom’s stability is as good as the top floor of a house of cards or eating cotton candy in the rain. Sometimes, you might get lucky and maintain your connection for a while, but it always feels like the drop is coming. Onboard, that means spending a lot of your time in the Royal Caribbean app wrestling with connection settings rather than enjoying your trip.

For whatever reason, connecting to Voom is more involved than connecting to the average Wi-Fi network in your house or a coffee shop. Sure, you start in the settings app like normal, where you’ll be prompted to set a PIN and make your Voom profile, but then you have to head to the Royal Caribbean app, where you again have to confirm that you want to join the network and make sure that you’re within the limits of the data plan you’ve paid for.

And, by the time you’ve done that, sometimes the network has dropped out on you — especially if you’ve changed decks or sides of the ship. In my case, I had to connect over and over again, cycling my phone on and off the Wi-Fi to force a reconnection. For whatever reason, Voom and my iPhone 16 Pro did not want to play nicely together. It would drop if I went to the crowded top decks with the zipline and pools. It would drop if I went to the lower decks for a morning briefing or dinner at night. It wasn’t just my iPhone, either — both my MacBook Air and Pixel 9 Pro gave me similar Starlink problems when choosing one device to keep connected at a time.

Wi-Fi costs extra, and this is what you get?

Ultimately, my problem with Voom isn’t the just-okay speeds — I don’t have another option in the middle of the ocean. It’s not just the poor reliability, either, as I know I’m competing with thousands of other people to stay connected. Instead, my biggest issue with Starlink at sea is that it suffers from a combination of the two and then asks you to pay a pretty penny for the service.

It is, essentially, the same thing that gives me pause before recommending satellite Wi-Fi when asked about it. Sure, it can commit to a certain level of speed when conditions are great, and sure, it should be pretty reliable, but there’s no guarantee when you’re relying on a constellation of satellites to hit a small dish (or, in Royal Caribbean’s case, a line of several large dishes) and then meter out the connection to several hungry devices. Give it a particularly cloudy afternoon or thick tree coverage, and you’re probably in for a rough day of data.

And yes, I can hear you saying that the point of a cruise is to get off your phone and simply enjoy a few days off. I don’t disagree. But, when a single connection costs around $25 per day for little more than the ability to stay connected to friends and family, you should be able to count on some level of consistency.

Instead, it felt like Voom was playing games with me, holding the data stream from the Starlink constellation and only letting me get connected if I asked nicely. I might not have faced any life-or-death connection scenarios, but I also can’t promise that Voom and Starlink would have pulled through if I did. Or at least I’d probably have to reconnect to the network halfway through.