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| A Royal Caribbean employee surfs the web in a crew cabin on Radiance of the Seas |
I recently visited Seattle where I experienced what can only be explained as The Love Boat meets Gilligan's Island.
The gadget adventure included a three-hour (or so) tour on the Radiance of the Seas, a 90,090-ton, 962-foot ship where eager sailors from the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines showed off how they've bought into the gadgetry revolution.
Royal Caribbean has built all kinds of computing gear into the ship. The various technologies provide passengers and crew with a wireless satellite connection to the Internet. There's also an on-board network, and the cruise line is working on the introduction of handheld computers on the high seas.
Now Royal Caribbean doesn't run the famed Love Boat featured in the 70s and 80s television show. That's owned by the Princess Cruises, a competitor.
Then again Gilligan, the Skipper, the Howells, nor any of the other castaways were onboard. But IBM was. And if ever there is a present-day equivalent of Gilligan's Island in the technology world, it's the gadget-minded folks from Big Blue who perpetually seem to be cutting and pasting weird bits of technology gear together.
I did note that Jon Prial, director of marketing and strategy of IBM's pervasive computing division, bears a passing resemblance to the Professor, but I digress.
A cruise ship is a great place to use mobile gadgetry because space on-board is at a premium. Staterooms are barely big enough to swing a laptop and accommodations for the crew are even smaller.
Nevertheless, the cruise line has wired a wireless satellite Internet connection to the 1,050 guest cabins on the ship, so laptop-toting cruisers can get at their e-mail and cruise the Web.
The 830-crew members also have IBM designed Internet access system in their quarters.
When they built the Radiance of the Seas, Royal Caribbean engineered an Ethernet connection into all guest quarters when it was built. All future ships will have the same type of infrastructure, promised the company.
The network gives access to the ship's Intranet and out to the Internet via satellite.
Guests have to share a 128-kilobit per second connection, while the crew shares a 64 kbps connection. By comparison, home modems connect at about 53 kbps. Faster always-on home Internet connections run 500 to 800 kbps. So zippy Web page access is not possible on-board. To this end, multimedia and file downloads are blocked.
However not all passengers use the service, nor do they use it all at the same time.
Tom Murphy, Royal Caribbean's CIO, said that his staff has been measuring passenger usage during the inaugural voyages and they have yet to see more than 63 kbps of the available 128 kbps being used.
Should demand suddenly spike, he said the crew can remedy the problem. "They can allocate more bandwidth to guests if necessary, however (guests) shouldn't expect a T1 experience." A T1 is a common corporate Internet connection with bandwidth of 1.544 megabits per second.
The ship's Internet system also stores commonly accessed web pages on its servers to improve performance.
Passengers pay 50 cents US (about 75 cents Canadian) per minute of connect time. That's US$30 (or about$45 Canadian) an hour. Bandwidth is very expensive at sea. Then again everything is overpriced in the hotel business and floating hotels are no exception.
Crewmembers get free usage of the IBM NetVista Internet appliances in their cabins. The devices are thin clients, meaning that they consist of a wall-mounted LCD screen and a keyboard. This system is wired into the ship's network. There are no hard drives in the crew cabins, so all data is saved to the ship's servers.
CrewNection connect time is free, but the company says it will soon start billing staff 15 cents US (22 cents Canadian) per minute for usage.
Passengers who don't have computers can also access the Web through Internet appliances in the ship's Internet cafe.
It's most popular on formal night, when passengers dress up for an evening of dining and entertainment. Webcams on the Internet café terminals are used to snap cruisers pictures and then the $4.95 US ($7.50 Canadian) digital postcards are e-mailed to friends and family on the spot. "It's a 'ha ha look at us' e-mail. It's very popular," said Murphy.
The CrewNection project came about after staff complained to the company's president about two to three hour-long lineups in the wee hours of the morning when they were permitted access to the devices.
At the staff meeting, Royal Caribbean president Jack Williams responded by saying "we'll have to put the Internet in all cabins," explained Murphy. "The staff cheered. Then Jack came back to me and said: can we do this?" Nine months later CrewNection was launched.
I saw the system in Gabriella Romero's cabin. The guest services worker, who is on her second four-month contract with Royal Caribbean, is likes the system because it allows her to stay in touch via Microsoft's Hotmail service with her family back in Equador.
Presumably, the web-based e-mail also gives employees protection from snoopers.
Romero said that the Internet service is connected most of the time, though there have been occasional outages. Embarrassingly, the system wouldn't work when demonstrated in Romero's cabin. At the time, the ship was docked in Seattle.
There are also outages when the satellite is too low in the sky and is blocked by landmasses. This can sometime occur when the ship sails north to Alaska.
The technology project is one of a series that the cruise line is embarking. Next on the agenda is a project to provide shipboard schedules and shore itineraries for passengers with handheld computers.
"Let's say a passenger gets off in St. Maarten, we could provide a guide to shopping and perhaps offer coupons," said Murphy, who added that the company's IT staff is prototyping the concept.
Meanwhile the company has had success with using handheld computers in ship dining rooms. Sommeliers use wireless Palm handheld computers to order wine for guest tables, which speeds up its delivery.
The company is also looking at 802.11b wireless network connections on-board. The problem it has encountered so far is that ships are made of steel and wireless signals don't penetrate the walls well. However if IT staff can find a way to overcome this problem, wireless technology may be used to retrofit older ships in the fleet with Internet connections in passenger cabins.
Royal Caribbean is also looking at finding a way to give passengers a cellular phone connection onboard its ships.
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Look Mac, I'm just gonna tell you once - you have to back up to the web with XDrive 
Adding RAM is easy, 
