Measurements aboard two cruise ships show that passenger Wi-Fi performance reflects both Starlink connectivity and the network operating inside the vessel. On Silver Muse, the researchers estimated that the onboard network added about 8–9 milliseconds to median latency, and passenger throughput measurements indicated limits associated with purchased Wi-Fi plans.
The November 4, 2026, research preprint by Zhao, Malekinasab, and Pan of the University of Victoria examines two voyages: Utopia of the Seas in the Bahamas in December 2025 and Silver Muse in the Adriatic Sea in July 2026. The paper reports measurements rather than a fleet-wide assessment, and its arXiv publication is a preprint.
The study combines terminal telemetry, measurements from passenger devices, and external cloud-server probes. Those observation points allow the researchers to examine the satellite connection and the service experienced by a passenger as related parts of a larger network.
The Passenger Connection Includes Several Network Elements
A passenger’s device first communicates with the ship’s Wi-Fi network. Traffic then passes through onboard networking equipment before reaching an external connection. The satellite link is one component of that route.
The Silver Muse measurements identify an added median delay of about 8–9 milliseconds within the onboard portion of the connection. That result applies to the measured conditions on that vessel. It helps explain why a passenger-device test and a measurement closer to the satellite terminal can produce different results.
The researchers also observed throughput behavior consistent with passenger service-plan limits. A plan can restrict the speed available to a device even when the underlying connection has additional capacity. The resulting passenger experience reflects both network performance and the commercial configuration of the Wi-Fi service.
Starlink’s wider network includes links between satellites as well as connections to ground infrastructure. New Space Economy’s explanation of Starlink laser communications provides background on that part of the network beyond the vessel.
Multiple Links Can Be Managed in Different Ways
Shipboard networking systems can distribute traffic across several connections. Load balancing assigns sessions to available links. Packet bonding combines links for traffic within a session by distributing packets across them.
Those mechanisms have different effects on how available capacity is used. A load-balanced passenger session can remain associated with one connection, even when other sessions use another. A bonded session can draw on several links through the bonding system.
Peplink’s Starlink documentation describes networking products that support these arrangements. In a January 2024 announcement, Peplink reported aggregating Starlink connections to achieve throughput above 1 gigabit per second. That figure is the company’s reported aggregation result, separate from the passenger measurements in the cruise-ship paper.
Routing Changes and Passenger Continuity
The researchers observed public IP address changes within the same ground-network connection point. They also found that an interruption at an individual terminal did not necessarily interrupt a passenger’s traffic flow.
Those observations connect terminal behavior with the shipboard system’s handling of traffic. A vessel operating multiple connections can present passengers with a service whose continuity differs from the status of any single terminal. The study’s combination of terminal and passenger measurements records those differences directly.
