WARNING – First World Problem Epic Rant Incoming

I’ve loved my time with Silversea.  I discovered them quite by accident when searching for a World Cruise in 2018 to celebrate my retirement.  My only cruise experience before the world cruise was a week around Hawaii (with my Mother) and a week on the western Mediterranean on Disney (with Mother, Sister and her family).   I picked Silversea because they were the only cruise line whose world cruise was going as far north as Japan.

It’s been great.  It is not cheap, very much so, but the service is amazing.  Food is wonderful.  The crew pay attention to the details.  When during a side trip to Cambodia the airline had mechanical issues, the escorting crew were all over chasing down solutions.  Amazing.  I will highly recommended Silversea to anyone.

But the internet is f*^%@$# tragic.

The above is from Speed Test.  Silversea offers a basic one-device per passenger internet deal included in the base cruise price.  I do not expect fiber-optic broadband.  I’m not playing competitive PVP video games nor streaming movies. It is a technological marvel that we have internet access at all in the middle of the ocean.  But I am convinced that Charles Darwin had better internet when he visited the Galapagos on HMS Beagle.

The upgraded internet offer was only a 0.05% price increase for my cruise, so I bought it.  Here is a sampling of speed tests over the next three days:

The download speed increased by 4x (once).  However, the eagle-eyed of you may have seen something awry.  70% of the tests report an upload speed of 0.0 Mbps.  Zero.  Zilch.  Nada.  Butkus.

Now, my college degrees are in computer science and information technology.  I understand enough about network protocols that the upload speed isn’t really zero.  If that were true, I could never even send the “start” command for the test.  But is does mean that the upload is so painfully slow and/or inconsistent that Speed Test is just getting random noise and gives up.  This is backed up by WordPress, which is where I host my blog.  Attempting to upload a picture of any size results in constant “upload fail” timeout messages.

This is what I do to have a chance to upload images onto my blog:

• My Canon D80 DSLR takes 6000×4000 pixel CR2 (raw) images that average 38MB in size
• My Motorola Moto G Power mobile phone takes 4000×3000 JPG images that average 4MB in size
• After each hike I transfer all the images to my laptop, pick which ones to upload to the blog and move them into Adobe Lightroom
• In Lightroom I crop where needed and edit for color, lens correction, etc. and then save all as JPG
• I then open the image in Paint.net to resize each image max dimension to 1000px and reduce its JPG quality until its size is less than 150 KB
• I now have a 1-in-10 chance of successfully loading the image onto my blog

That’s right, even with a 150 KB image I have a 90% no-load rate.  It can fail in 3 seconds or 3 minutes.  But fail it usually does.  Sometimes I magnify my work arounds by uploading in off-hours.  On Monday I woke up an hour early.  Today I ate dinner in my cabin and was able to load quickly since everyone else was in the dining room.

My technology career did not take me into network configuration, but f@#k.  With 100 passengers I should own 1% of the passenger upload pipe.  If I’m not using it, it can be divvied out to the rest. But my 1% has got to be better than 1990 AOL dial-up modem speeds.  At 56 Kbps I could consistently upload each of my super-reduced images in around 20 seconds.

The 2019 World Cruise had the same issue.  There I could wait to get into port and then use my mobile phone as a tether to upload larger images or video over the mobile phone network.  Read that again.  On my zillion dollar world cruise, I needed to send pictures to my friends by using a third-world country’s phone networks.

I don’t know what the answer is.  I know that part of the problem is that everything else is so good on Silversea that anything that isn’t 9-out-of-10 stands out.  But WOW is this frustrating.