How sending a single picture cost me more than a hundred bucks

On board life - Copyright Portolan

Sending pretty pictures whilst at sea, can be a hazardous undertaking. A story from a tourist on a cruise to explain why life on board is not the sharing life we all came to know.

Recently I had the opportunity to sail along on a large cruise ship, sailing from Hamburg to Zeebrugge in a matter of four days. Whilst aboard the ship and whilst visiting the different Hanseatic cities on our route, I had my phone, which is also my camera, present at all times in order to capture what I was experiencing in those moments, knowing that I would not be aboard of a cruise vessel again any time soon.

Sharing these experiences on the whole, is now part of how we have come to interact with our friends and family. We share, and we like, and we search for instant gratification and instant feedback through our posts, comments and pictures, in order to feel good about ourselves and in order to get that attention that we so desperately seek from others.

In so doing it is amazing how accustomed we have become to having the ability to roam and use our phone’s data connection anywhere we go in Europe. On the eve of the first anniversary of the end of European roaming charges, 82% of the Eurobarometer survey respondents claim that they have benefitted from the end of these roaming charges (source). Surveys seldomly tell the whole story, but in my own experience, using the data connection on my phone, before the European legislation came into force, was just too expensive. Now that the new rules apply, data usage on my side is ubiquitous, independent of which European countries I visit. Or so I believed.

On my trip along the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Amsterdam our ship travelled back and forth between inland waters and international waters. When in reach of a local transmission tower, I would have sufficient coverage on my smartphone to keep my data consumption up and in so doing, keep up with the Joneses back home. When we reached international waters however, things changed, as the roaming charges that applied were up to €13/MB. In my case this would have resulted in data usage charges that surpassed € 2.000 on a daily basis. And I am not alone.

Not long ago a boy in Normay (source) succeeded in racking up a € 12.000 bill due to watching YouTube video’s whilst in international waters. The boy’s German family when presented with the bill/invoice spoke of an ‘immoral’ bill for which payment could not be upheld.

Travelling across our beautiful European nation therefore is helped a great deal by the removal of the roaming charges that forced us to be very vigilant when crossing imaginary lines between nations. This fact, at least for the moment, remains the case when these imaginary lines find themselves somewhere off our coastlines and in the international waters that lie in-between our European nations.

The latter should however trigger somewhat of a shocking revelation to those who are keen to automate shipping and those who are looking forwards to the advent of autonomous ships and remote-controlled merchant trade. The key driver behind these very high prices for data consumption at sea is the fact that the demand for data connections is rapidly exceeding the supply as not enough satellites are orbiting the earth. As shipping operations become more and more data driven, the demand for larger amounts of data consumption whilst sailing international waters will only increase. Hence companies such as SpaceX and Arianespace have the right idea when they aim to launch several thousand additional satellites into space in order to get the global data coverage up to 1 gigabit per second.

We've come a long way since postal pigeon & carriers took more than a few days to reach another country on the european continent. However, the new ways of communicating have not yet found their way onto the many vessels sailing our seas given the high cost of data connections.

Hope however is on the horizon, as every sailor should be able to share their magnificent sunset selfies with their homefront as well soon.