Harm Bathoorn sent some emails with useful information about metered internet access on board ships in Europe (around 5 Mar 2002).

This page started out by copying those emails, paraphrasing and then summarizing them. I have "INCLUD"ed the summary on the Metered Internet Access page.

Contents:

Summary

(March, 2002) Shipboard and mobile use is another story -- some people pay US $2 per minute for approximately 1 kbps aboard ship. That is a real burden!

See MeteredInternetAccessEuropeShipboardAndMobile.

Shipboard Use

Harm Bathoorn provided this information in a post to expert@mandrake-linuxPLEASENOSPAM.com on 5 Mar 2002:

Should've known you'd have it on your site:) Time to move to postfix I suppose, the spammers stumbled on my GSM-connected mailbox aboard ship. Believe me: If you're abroad getting mail with 9k max (reality is thus 1K max) at about 2US$ a minute (per minute!) you want to shoot them.

A later post:

The main cost factor constitute the so called "roaming costs" when I'm abroad with my gsm. They used to be different per country but have now been 'harmonized' by the European Commission. Alas it only made the cheap ones more expensive:(

The 'roaming' is the 2$ I was mentionning, on top of that you have to pay for the connection itself which can vary depending on time of day, gsm-provider, and Interenet provider.

Some gsm providers allow data access through so called 'pre-pay cards' (actually only in Germany and the Netherlands) giving the option to be able to connect locally without the roaming costs. Others especially the French even refuse to take you as a paying customer if you're domicile isn't in France and offer no data access. That way I'm forced to call a foreign ISP number and pay for this extremely expensive connection. All in all in the most expensive case: up to 4$ a minute.

Two way satelite would be an option but is still not implemented or even allowed in Europe. Downloading via satelite is allowed but needs a telephone connection for the upload giving considerable speed gain though. Alas even a one-way satelite connection is extremely expensive, you have to be a big user to break even.

GPRS could relieve this problem on the short run, on the long term only 2-way satelite in my opinion.

Spam mail is about the worst that can happen to you, financially.

In a later post, he followed up with:

The 2$ is only a rough average sometimes it sums up to 4$ a minute.

Spammers I want to shoot and .doc attachments which aren't zipped, I bounce with a rant telling what the extra costs are to download all the extra 'non-information'.

Rest asured though, this is my broadband cable connection at home:) I do intermediate for other skippers using Linux every now and then though.

Contributors

• RandyKramer - 6 Mar 2002
• Harm Bathoorn -- 5 Mar 2002