MIAMI – Pam Lome loves sitting on the deck when she’s on a cruise, the shoreline shrinking on the horizon as the ship pulls out to sea. It’s relaxing to know that, at least for a short time, she’s leaving her everyday troubles behind.
“It’s supposed to be a way to get away from it all,” said Lome, a 45-year-old former travel agent from Buffalo Grove, Ill.
But with a new service the industry is beginning to embrace, the tranquility many passengers cherish on cruises may be shattered by the cacophony of ringing cellphones. The service makes regular mobile phones work even when communications towers are miles of ocean away.
It’s just the latest way technology is changing cruise vacations, which now offer Internet access, pay-per-view television and digital music libraries.
To Beth Abrams, the more communications technology onboard, the better.
Abrams, a 40-year-old first-grade teacher from Freehold, N.J., recently traveled on the Norwegian Dawn from New York down the East Coast. The ship was close enough to shore to reach Nextel phone’s network, so she could stay in touch. “I need it. My husband’s self-employed. He needs to be in contact on a daily basis. We have someone taking care of our home that we need to talk to. We have pets at home that we need to check up on,” she said while the ship was docked in Miami.
Carnival Corp. &PLC, the world’s largest cruise company, is testing cellphone service on its Costa Cruises line in Europe and plans to eventually install the equipment on more ships, said Trevor Brydges, Carnival’s supervisor of shipboard technology.
Carnival’s main rival, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., just began offering the service on the Island Escape, a ship it operates on the Mediterranean through a joint venture.
AT&T Wireless Services Inc. and Maritime Telecommunications Network Inc. created the system used on the Island Escape. Wireless equipment on the ship relays calls to satellite transmitters, which then beam the signals to shore.
Prices for U.S.-based cruises haven’t been set yet, but they could be similar to rates on European cruises, where the price per minute can be about $1.69, roughly the same as a roaming call, AT&T Wireless spokeswoman Rochelle Cohen said.
The cellphone signals piggyback on systems that transmit Internet data to cruise ships via satellite. Since Internet service was introduced about five years ago, it has grown to be used by about 15 percent of passengers, industry officials said.
George Hall, 54, is a big fan of onboard e-mail. He was vacationing on the Dawn last year when the heating system at his home in New York’s Hudson Valley malfunctioned, cranking the temperature to 95 degrees.
Hall’s house-sitter contacted him by e-mail. Together they diagnosed the problem and arranged to get it repaired before Hall’s cruise ended.
Internet service generally comes to cruise passengers at 128 to 256 kilobits per second, faster than dial-up but below broadband connections such as DSL and cable modems.
Passengers can Web surf in designated Internet cafes, and many ships have wireless access points at spots around the vessels.
Associated Press
Beth Abrams downloads her video images to her laptop computer in her cruise ship cabin during a stop in Miami.
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