Internet Connections on the High Seas - Page 2

“As the traffic was going up, we could continue to add more horsepower, but we couldn’t make the experience faster,” he says, noting that they tried increasing bandwidth, tinkering with quality of service parameters, and so on. “We could ‘feed the beast,’ so far as bandwidth consumption goes, but we were not able to deliver an improved experience because of the inherent delay in satellite traffic,” he says.

That’s when Crystal Cruises gave F5 Network’s WebAccelerator web application delivery product a go in the summer.

“The performance increased drastically on board the ships since we implemented the F5,” Andersson says. “We were spiking 2 to 3 hours a day to top speeds of 710/664 Kbit/s, 18 to 27 days per month, before we started the F5 implementation. Using the same satellite connection in August/September, when the upgrades were complete, we were spiking approximately 12 to 13 hours a day, 2000-3000Kbit/s, 30 days a month.”

By decreasing page download times, WebAccelerator offloads servers, decreases bandwidth usage, and ensures the productivity of application end users, according to F5.

Another advantage for Crystal is that the WebAccelerator requires only one box in corporate headquarters — no equipment is needed on board either ship. It’s a plus not to have to worry about a problem that would require a replacement to be shipped to a ship, considering that a vessel could be in the Antarctic and days away from the nearest post office when an event occurs.

Shipboard personnel benefit, too, in terms of better connections to corporate applications, such as doing on-board bookings for repeat cruisers.

“We have lots of central applications in the office, that get loaded over and over again, so clearly that would increase the performance of that,” Andersson says. “This wasn’t the primary purpose for doing this, but it was a pleasant side effect.”