← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.07191 · v1
A First Look at Starlink Maritime on Cruise Ships
首次提交 2026-11-05 06:25
版本更新 2026-11-05 06:25
雷达观测 2026-11-06 10:04
摘要
Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite networks are reshaping maritime connectivity, offering much lower latency and higher capacity than traditional geostationary (GEO) links. As a single user terminal (UT) cannot serve hundreds to thousands of passengers, a cruise ship often deploys several UTs behind an onboard multi-WAN router for aggregated capacity and load balancing. Consequently, passenger connectivity depends not only on the satellite links but also on how the router distributes sessions among UTs. In this paper, we measure Starlink maritime connectivity on two cruise ships of different scales, Utopia of the Seas near the Bahamas in December 2025 and Silver Muse in the Adriatic Sea in July 2026, combining UT telemetry, inside-out measurements from a passenger device, and outside-in measurements from cloud servers near Starlink Points of Presence (PoPs). We find that the onboard network, rather than the satellite links, largely determines the passenger experience, as cruise lines rate limit each passenger device. Moreover, the public IP address of a passenger device changes not only at PoP handovers but also within the same PoP. Furthermore, while the country code reported by the UT reflects the maritime jurisdiction of the ship, the serving PoP follows neither this jurisdiction nor geographic proximity alone, suggesting factors beyond the distance-based PoP boundaries observed in Starlink aviation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of Starlink on commercial cruise ships, complementing prior land mobile and in-flight measurements.
作者备注：6 pages, 7 figures
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v1 · 2026-11-05 06:25 · 最新观测版本
A First Look at Starlink Maritime on Cruise Ships
Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite networks are reshaping maritime connectivity, offering much lower latency and higher capacity than traditional geostationary (GEO) links. As a single user terminal (UT) cannot serve hundreds to thousands of passengers, a cruise ship often deploys several UTs behind an onboard multi-WAN router for aggregated capacity and load balancing. Consequently, passenger connectivity depends not only on the satellite links but also on how the router distributes sessions among UTs. In this paper, we measure Starlink maritime connectivity on two cruise ships of different scales, Utopia of the Seas near the Bahamas in December 2025 and Silver Muse in the Adriatic Sea in July 2026, combining UT telemetry, inside-out measurements from a passenger device, and outside-in measurements from cloud servers near Starlink Points of Presence (PoPs). We find that the onboard network, rather than the satellite links, largely determines the passenger experience, as cruise lines rate limit each passenger device. Moreover, the public IP address of a passenger device changes not only at PoP handovers but also within the same PoP. Furthermore, while the country code reported by the UT reflects the maritime jurisdiction of the ship, the serving PoP follows neither this jurisdiction nor geographic proximity alone, suggesting factors beyond the distance-based PoP boundaries observed in Starlink aviation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of Starlink on commercial cruise ships, complementing prior land mobile and in-flight measurements.
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