Coming to a cruise ship near you: Fast Internet

Is the era of super-slow Internet on cruise ships finally coming to an end?

The communications company behind the Internet service on many of the world's cruise vessels today announced an ambitious plan to increase connection speeds to levels many times faster than they are today.

MTN Satellite Communications says its new MTN Nexus network will be fast enough to allow cruisers to stream video and quickly post vacation photos at online sites such as Facebook and Tumbler — activities that can be difficult from ships at today's connection speeds.

"If this thing feels twice as fast we've failed," MTN CEO and president Errol Olivier tells USA TODAY. "It's got to feel five times, 10 times faster. It's got to get close to the land-based experience."

MTN says it already has laid the groundwork for the new network. At the heart of the system will be two new satellites scheduled for launch in 2015 and 2016 over the Caribbean and Mediterranean, respectively, that will allow the company to direct "spot beams" of Internet bandwith at the areas most frequented by cruise ships. The resulting signal will be much stronger than the "broad beam" signal provided today by satellites serving cruise ships.

"You can think of it like a Maglite flashlight," says Olivier. "The wider you make that beam, the weaker it is at all points."

In addition, MTN is building out new shore-to-ship wireless systems in major cruise ports in the Bahamas, Caribbean, Alaska and Europe that will allow the company to greatly increase the amount of data it routes to ships at sea. Cruise ships approaching ports fitted with the new wireless systems will be able to switch from the company's satellite system and get data directly from land at much higher speeds, freeing up satellite bandwith for other vessels.

Olivier says MTN already has built out the new wireless systems at seven sites in Alaska and is now beginning to roll them out in the Caribbean and Europe. The company plans to have the systems deployed at 39 locations frequented by cruise ships by the second quarter of 2013, he says.

A third prong in the new effort is to outfit cruise ships with more sophisticated systems that will allow the vessels to cache large data files such as Netflix videos that cruisers download from the Internet. Once stored on board, the data could be accessed again and again by cruisers at high speed without having to be re-transmitted over a satellite.

In short, when one cruiser downloads a video to a ship, under the new system, "we can save it on board and reuse it again," says Olivier.

The ability of the new land-based wireless systems to transmit large amounts of data to ships when they are in or near ports will open up new possibilities in data package pricing for cruisers.

"We're now in a position where ... we will have different types of packages where people can have immediate deliver or delayed delivery (of data)," Olivier says.

MTN says it is spending tens of millions of dollars to create the new network, which also will require significant investment in new equipment by cruise lines.

Olivier acknowledges that cruisers aren't happy with the current state of Internet connectivity on ships, which is perceived as slow and expensive. The company's goal with the MTN Nexus network is to finally solve the problem, he says. No other company has gone to such lengths to do so, he adds.

"Today's passengers and crew members are very demanding, and they don't want anything different than what we get in our own offices and at home," he says.

The old argument that providing fast Internet on ships is difficult just no longer will cut it, he says.

"They don't want excuses."