What happens then offshore? How is it possible to have coverage on board a cruise ship? The key lies in the maritime coverage provided by the installation of repeater antennas with satellite connection on the boats. But be careful with their prices; if you don’t know them, surely you put your hands to your head when you see your bill.
Tip: On the high seas, airplane mode is best
The mobile phone antennas located along the coast that provide coverage on land are the ones that provide the signal to mobile phones on boats close to shore. Its signal is broadcast omnidirectionally and, therefore, it can reach the sea, but the distance that its coverage reaches depends on factors such as the location, power or orientation of said antennas.
It also matters if there are hills or tall buildings that get in your way or if there are a number of people using the network at any given time. The positive part is that, once at sea, there are no obstacles, so the maritime range of land-based antennas can be even greater than on land. As a rule, the signal begins to lose about 15 miles from the coastwhen ships move out of range of terrestrial mobile phone towers.
However, we must bear in mind that our mobiles do not exceed 2 W of power (which limits them when it comes to receiving a signal at a great distance) and telephone antennas are not usually optimized for broadcast its signal with more power towards the sea (where there are far fewer customers). This implies that land cover of acceptable quality is usually no more than a few kilometers.
All cruise ships have satellite Internet connection service
Does that mean that we can not use the mobile from there? No, far from it. If you’re going on a cruise ship or ferry, it’s likely that the ship itself offers WiFi or voice services to its passengers at a generally high price. To do this, they use repeater antennas with satellite connection that provide maritime coverage that you can connect to on your own.
The problem is that connecting to the Internet or making phone calls using that maritime coverage is usually quite expensive. Rather, it is very expensive. And so that you can judge for yourself, here you have, for example, the Movistar and Orange rates:
- Movistar maritime coverage: for both contract and prepaid customers, Movistar prices are 7.13 euros per minute with establishment of 3.02 euros per call received or sent, 36.30 euros per MB of data issued and received, 1.21 euros per SMS sent and 4.84 euros per MMS sent (SMS and MMS received are free).
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Orange sea coverage: in this case, the service can only be used by contract and has a price of 10.31 euros per minute with an establishment charge of 0.73 euros per call made or received, and 1.21 euros per SMS sent (those received are free and does not support data traffic).
When the ship approaches the coast and the mobile detects land coverage, it will automatically connect to it and you will have your usual rate again (with the corresponding roaming applied by your operator in that country). Our advice, therefore, is that, as soon as you get a little further from the coast, put the mobile in airplane mode and do not use it neither to call nor to surf the Internet (unless the cruise offers free WiFi, of course).
And how do ships communicate with each other? Safety on the high seas cannot depend on systems with a limited range such as mobile telephony, so they tend to resort to to high frequency equipment (VHF) capable of reaching a distance of 30 miles, either with other vessels or with ground stations. Another option is to use a satellite phone, but its data transmission speed is quite low and it only works outdoors when it is clear.