On the 4th Jan 2017, I left Southampton, on the P & O ship Oceana, for a 35 night cruise to the Caribbean and the USA on what promised to be a really great start to my 65 year.
I will turn 65 in October so by my calculations I should have, by now, been created, and will be forming, I would liked to have talked to my mom, and asked her, when she knew she was pregnant, but unfortunately she has dementia and that memory is lost.
I had brought with me most of my travelling computing equipment, my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and my Kindle, with the first 6 days after out initial stop in Spain, at sea, I have planned to complete a little work, and start writing a little. The ships WiFi showed up on my Mac, and I logged in, it has been some time since our last cruise, but it looked the same, £12 for 24 hours, fine by me I thought, I will dib into this and let my system catch up, 15 min should be enough to send stored emails, pick up waiting mail, and let Apple save the photos on line and I will log out as before, 24 hours should last a long while.
Little did I realise, and the opening screen made no reference, but once the 24 hours has started, there is no logging out, I can’t stop it, I can stop my machines use, but the 24 hour clock kept ticking.
So my plans to dib into the time like all the other cruises was scuppered, to use a nautical phrase. So after complaining to reception I got no where, but referred to the cyber librarian, who understood my pain, but was unable to help, except give me a credit for the last 24 hour period I had lost because I thought I was able to use it as before. At this point the word maritime was used saying anything connected to satellites is expensive and slow, I intend to come back to this point later.
So for the best part of my trip, what I planned as a technology fuelled holiday, fully connected turned out to be anything but, OK the trip was otherwise as planned, great ship, good food, plenty of onboard entertainment, and far to much to drink. But I am a tech junky, I want full connection to the net, I wanted to talk to my family and friends. Google and the like, and I am on the cusp here, I use gmail, as well as Apple, They both promote the life style of connection,yet the moment I leave land I am stuffed,
So here it is P & O, I like your ships, yet for such a simple thing you take such a ridiculous stance, the ship is full of wifi, the walls in the bar are promoting the latest game of English football, live yet for accessing email a paltry insignificant portion of your ships download I am penalised.
Let's just review what the ship is using in terms of wifi connection, and satellite connection, general navigation, engineering, communication back to p& o base, a lot more than the passenger use, I once did some research in passenger flights and realised that each engine on an airplane say just four engines, has 2500 sensors,, per engine communicating with its base, live.
It does not take too much imagination to establish to general communication campsite of and ocean going liner the size of Oceana, to realise that the ships use is far in excess of the passengers, yet we are treated like morons and charges inexcusable as a profit margin. Over dinner, one of the table mentioned that several of the screens in one of the bars was playing live football, and that is coming into the ship by satellite
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