Staying Connected out at Sea
There are no two ways about it – connecting to the internet while you’re out at sea can be an eye-wateringly expensive exercise. Whether you have your own boat or are using a ferry/cruise ship to travel, internet can be hard to come by. Though in the case of ferries and cruise ships the price is often marked up to make a profit off of passengers.
It’s a simple matter of ICT infrastructure. People living in cities have plenty of cables and internet towers to deliver internet to them. People living in rural areas do not have many optic cables and often have to rely on wi-fi hubs or satellite internet providers. However, there are still plenty of dedicated internet users in rural areas that the costs are mitigated.
At sea, it is very expensive to install and maintain an infrastructure which overall sees far fewer customers than satellite users in a rural area. Therefore the internet you get out at sea is very costly. For those of us who have our own boats it’s a totally different story because even though the internet we managed to get is expensive, it still offers very little by way of reliability. Don’t even get me started about the speed…
Otherwise, it’s perhaps still very important to stay connected out at sea, so I’ve put together a couple of pointers for cruise ship passengers who might want to save on the costs associated with the expensive connectivity they’ll have no choice but to settle for.
Go for the pay-per-megabyte option
Generally the cruise liner you’re sailing with will offer on-board internet as one of three options, namely pay-per-minute internet, pay-per-megabyte, and a final option which is a variation of the two mentioned ones; a bulk connectivity package.
The best one out of the three is perhaps that of the pay-per-megabyte option. The time-sensitive option is pretty much a setup because your connectivity expires as a factor of time, which means if there’s no internet for the 30 minutes you paid for, you’ve lost out. The bulk connectivity package option might seem like a better deal, but what happens invariably is that you’ll waste a lot of money with your unused data expiring. The pay-per-megabyte option might seem a bit more expensive, but considering issues of connectivity and time, it’s always the best option.
Use apps instead of a web browser
Apps which connect to the internet are much better than connecting with a web browser because that way your data is only used for what it’s meant to be used for. There will be no unnecessary usage. Additionally, you can check out William Hill’s mobile betting app here for a great example of the type of apps you should be using.
In the specific instance of this particular app, users can effectively kill more than one bird with one stone in that the app offers many features through one connection, so to say. For example, it only takes the use of this one app to stay up to date with the latest sports news, actually watch live sports and perhaps take a punt if you’re into sports betting.
