The Art of Network Engineering
Join us as we explore the world of Network Engineering! In each episode, we explore new topics, talk about technology, and interview people in our industry. We peek behind the curtain and get insights into what it's like being a network engineer - and spoiler alert - it's different for everyone!
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The Art of Network Engineering
LAN Ho! Navigating Cruise Ship Networking
Beyond the sundecks and buffet lines lies a technological marvel most cruise passengers never consider - the complex network infrastructure keeping these floating cities connected and operational. In this fascinating conversation with Will Robbins, we dive deep into the unique challenges and solutions of maritime networking that blend hospitality technology with critical operational systems.
Have you ever wondered how thousands of cruisers can simultaneously post vacation photos from the middle of the ocean? Modern cruise ships deploy an impressive array of connectivity solutions - up to 15 separate connections including both traditional satellites and multiple Starlink antennas working in concert. This connectivity ballet must account for both the ship and satellites being in constant motion while managing variable weather conditions. The reduced latency of Starlink connections (150-250ms versus 500ms) has revolutionized the passenger experience, enabling video calls and remote work capabilities that were previously impossible.
What surprises most network professionals is the scale of onboard infrastructure. Each vessel houses a complete data center with 10-15 racks of equipment supporting everything from guest services to critical ship operations. These floating data centers must function independently since cloud-based applications would be unreliable with satellite connections. Adding to the complexity, the all-metal construction creates wireless challenges requiring thousands of access points while radar systems limit available wireless frequencies.
The conversation explores security considerations unique to maritime environments, including the practice of using different networking vendors across ships to prevent fleet-wide vulnerabilities. We also examine how these networks prioritize traffic, with casino operations receiving highest priority as major revenue generators. Whether you're a networking professional curious about specialized environments or a cruise enthusiast wondering how your vacation technology works, this episode offers rare insights into the engineering behind modern maritime adventures. Ready to see cruise ships through entirely new eyes?
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This is the Art of Network Engineering, where technology meets the human side of IT. Whether you're scaling networks, solving problems or shaping your career, we've got the insights, stories and tips to keep you ahead in the ever-evolving world of networking. Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering podcast. My name is Andy Laptev and in this episode we are talking about cruise ship networking. Is that what a cruise ship sounds like? I don't think so. I've been trying to think of like pirate analogies and all kinds of nonsense. I was even on chat GPT looking for funny intros, but that's all I got is just a stupid cruise ship horn. I am joined in this episode by Jeff Clark. How you doing, jeff?
Speaker 2:Doing great. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me Do a cruise ship sound?
Speaker 1:Yes, and our guest who knows all thing cruise ship networking, his name is Will Robbins. How you doing, will, I'm good Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here. We were just talking right before we started recording that. You know I've managed networks for I don't know 15 to 20 years give or take. I've lost track and Jeff has managed a bunch. And never once did I really consider like I was so excited when you reached out because I'm like whoa Networks on cruise ships, like holy crap that's. You know, five years into a show you're like I think we've covered it all. Guys Like should we shut the doors? I don't know. And then you appeared like hey, you want to talk about cruise ships, so I'm pretty jazzed to get into it. So I guess, how did you become involved with cruise ship networking? Is this one of those things like you're a network engineer hopping along and then you get this cool job at a cruise ship company?
Speaker 3:Well, so I was working at an MSP and there was a few. When you just apply online and you're like, just apply online and you're like they're not going to hire me, it sounds cool. So I applied and they called me back. I did a video interview where they basically have a question on the screen and you have five minutes to answer, and they went through three questions and it was kind of like, well, I hope they hear back. And I heard back and then they're like questions, and you know, it's kind of like, well, I hope they hear back. And I heard back and then they're like, hey, you want to come aboard? I'm like, hell, yeah, I do does he say come?
Speaker 1:aboard yeah, is it full of, like you know, maritime analogies?
Speaker 3:yes, but, but. But when you, when you call a cruise ship, a ship, call it a ship. They get very angry. When you call it a boat, yeah, I'm like, uh, so we get on this boat and they look at me. It's not a boat, it's a ship, call it a ship. They get very angry when you call it a boat. Yeah, I'm like, so we get on this boat and they look at me it's not a boat, it's a ship, okay so the interview?
Speaker 1:was it um, technical and like usually when you go through interviews, it's like they make sure you're not a sociopath and then it's a technical and it's a kind of that two-layer the first part.
Speaker 3:Uh, the video interview was a little technical, you know they. They were like I think one of the questions was about you know Palo Alto's, you know what is pre-rules and what are post-rules and which order do they come in, and I had to record me explaining that. And I think another one was on spanning tree or something. And then in the, I guess, face I would call it face-to-face interview yeah, there was a little bit more technical questions and just like where did I see myself? And all that kind of fun stuff.
Speaker 1:So some networking, some security. I would have fell on my face in security because I've never configured like an enterprise firewall. So did you know that there'd be some security stuff in there? Was that part of the job description?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and you know, through my career, I've worked, you know, a lot of a lot of companies have worked for, you know, firewalls have usually been added on along with load balancers, vpns, cruise ship networking. Because what I'd like to do, I think what would be most interesting to me and hopefully the audience, is how does cruise ship networking, how is it similar and different from what we're all used to? Right On the ground, the building isn't moving, we're not in weather, we're not constantly, you know, like I mean, it almost reminds me of like OT, right, like it's almost like um, like an industrial environment. Right, there's heat, there's, there's salt water, there's humidity, there's. It seems kind of like a brutal environment. So what were you doing before the cruise stuff?
Speaker 3:but then there's a hotel side of it as well. So before that I worked for an msp dedicated to a a uh government contractor customer carpeting, space buildings, not moving ships.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean what we're mostly used to, right. So, like people who are listening I don't think anyone listening hardly anyone will have any experience on like cruise ship networking, besides one person I think we had. It was at the era footman. I remember there was somebody we had on and she like, oh no, no, she worked on like oil rigs. Yeah, that's cool's cool too. Yeah, yeah, all right. So you're a network engineer like the rest of us. You've done the job and then you get this really cool job doing cruise ship networking. Like what were some of the biggest surprises? What's so? Like? It's all satellite, I guess. Right, like, walk us through. Like what does this look like?
Speaker 3:Like you know, do you have one data center. Larger ships have two data centers?
Speaker 1:are they hosting applications? Is that why they have a data center?
Speaker 3:yes, yes, you know, um, one of the prime examples was on some cruises. Now they don't have menus, they have qr codes. So you scan the qr code on your phone, it it links up to the network and it pulls that day's menu. It's like a food ordering system, just like the menus, because I guess they don't want to hand out physical menus anymore. Everything is a QR code.
Speaker 1:You can't host that in the cloud because of the satellite latency, I guess. So you need an on-prem data center in each ship, depending on the size of the ship. You said so every ship has a data center. Yes, yeah, depending on the size it depends on if it's one or two. Yeah, can you give us any sense of like? Is it one rack Like one?
Speaker 3:Oh no, it's a decent-sized data center. There are probably 10 to 15 racks in them for the larger ones.
Speaker 1:For smaller ones there may be like five or six Power cooling servers, gpus, routers I mean everything you'd have in a regular data center.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that sounds pretty traditional data center. What were the things? I mean, some of the things that I would think about on a ship like that would be. I mean, you're in a giant metal box right, a big Faraday cage, so I would think wireless would be a nightmare to deal with.
Speaker 3:Yes, so what? What a lot of, what a lot of um times they did is they had those little in room, those what they call them hospitality access points, um, and they were connected via what the phone is and the phone actually connected the ap. The ap connected, you know, and that's how a lot of them did that. So you have that in room because, like you said, you know, in traditional hotels, you know, between rooms is what? Drywall maybe not, I mean thin drywall, so the signal can easily penetrate that, but when you're on a ship it's steel yeah between rooms.
Speaker 2:It's steel everywhere what about your outdoor? A piece of stuff. I mean, I mean, I'm not an avid cruise goer or anything like that, but I have lots of friends that I have. In fact, I was talking to people about us doing this episode and they were telling me oh yeah, the last time I went on a cruise ship the internet speed was surprisingly really good and we had wireless everywhere. I would assume is there a lot of ruggedized stuff on there, or is it standard traditional off the shelf data center stuff?
Speaker 3:So outside, yes, but inside it's just. You know, your, your average equipment, it's not, you're not, you're not raining on the inside, hopefully, most times, yeah, no, let's, let's take on water, but yeah, it's, there's nothing industrial that's needed.
Speaker 1:I'm because I'm a data center person. I guess I'm fixated on that at the moment. Is any of that? I don't know if ruggedized is even a word, but, like you know, is each cable like screwed in with a special fastener so it can't fall out. No, it's just standard. Whatever right Like stuff screwed in.
Speaker 2:I guess if the boat's rocking that much, Andy, they probably have bigger problems in the data center.
Speaker 3:Everything is secured in the data center, but not everything is tied down.
Speaker 1:So is there a you, a network engineer, on each ship and is part of your job cruising the world, or is it remote?
Speaker 3:No. So on each ship they have these things called IT officers, and the IT officers are more generalists, so they know a little bit of networking, they know a little bit of server. They do a lot of end user support, like every time someone's having a problem with their computer on the ship, they take it to the IT officer and if the IT officer doesn't know then they move up the chain.
Speaker 1:But yeah, depending on the size of the ship, there's two to three it officers that's not a bad gig for somebody not tied down with like a ton of responsibility, like as a married life or something like what do you do? I just travel the world on a cruise ship. I'm an it guy. Like that's not bad. Get all the food and drinks, probably for you know, right? Yeah, well, that's bad.
Speaker 3:They get the uh, they go to the crew mess so the crew has an entirely separate area uh, than than guests do and they serve. They actually serve a lot better food like well, well, it's, it's. It's like you know, with crew ships there are, you know, ethnicity is from all over the place. What they serve the guests is more, you know, palatable to everybody. In the crew mess they serve a lot of, like ethnic dishes, like you're like oh my god.
Speaker 3:Like you know stuff that they can only get away with in a crew mess, because you know especially Americans going what's this that sounds delicious? Yeah, no, it definitely was.
Speaker 2:Now, did you go on any of the cruises as part of your job, or was it just the fun for you?
Speaker 3:So I went on. Onboarding was a cruise of the Caribbean, right, yeah, no, no. So no, the onboarding was we did a thing called a dry dock in Spain, and then I did a transatlantic. I spent 20 days on a new ship going from Cadiz, spain, to New York.
Speaker 1:So why do they have you on a ship? Like your job is remote, I think. Yes, Well, so it you know, like a geffiler in the environment you're going to support, I guess, right, yeah, I want you to hand it on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and sometimes having an American passport makes things a lot easier, yeah. So yeah, that was my initial and then I got moved to security and we have a group that does like the dry docks and that's like their main focus and at times you know people in that group. It can be hard on them because they travel 50, probably 50 percent of the time and you know when they needed help, like I went on a couple of cruises to install some compute nodes. So I'd be on the cruise for a week, install the compute nodes. We'd move over some some equipment off physicals and install the compute nodes. We'd move over some, um, some equipment off physicals and onto the compute node, so you'd be at sea installing stuff.
Speaker 1:I guess some I'm thinking like my. I have some family that worked in the airline industry and you know they're only making money when they're in the air. So I would assume that you would do moves, ads, changes, you know, upgrades while the ship is docked, but then they're not making money, so they set you out so that they can generate revenue and then you just do stuff at sea that makes sense, yeah, yeah, like the, uh, the actual like installing the equipment and staging, it was all c days, but the actual cutovers was uh when we were docked so the data center sounds kind of run of the mill.
Speaker 1:Right, it's, it's a data center, um, I guess you know there's. There's a land network on the ship, right like local communication there are, there are tons of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, because you've got guests, you got hospitality, you've got uh point of sale, you've got yeah well leaving controls for the ship.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking, right, like so. I'm thinking of our friend Lexi who works for Blue Origin and she runs the network on a spaceship. Right, and I didn't really until she said it it didn't dawn on me, but you know, like the rockets talking to the control system and the thruster thing and like so all the systems in the craft making it go have to traverse the network. So the same on a cruise ship, right, Like all the controls and the bridge and the navigation and every control in the ship I guess goes through your network. So the same on a cruise ship, right, Like all the controls and the bridge and the navigation and every control in the ship I guess goes through your network.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they were starting to move more to that. They were on their kind of own networks before, but then they started moving it. Yeah, moving it to the-.
Speaker 1:But I can see the one in the second. So I was trying to get through the network before we went to security but you just kind of brought me there. It's pretty important. So I was trying to get through the network before we went to security but you just kind of brought me there, like it's pretty important, so I can't see someone. Well, I guess I could. I'm not a hacker, but if I wanted to take a cruise ship down or get on the news, you know, and do something nefarious, I guess I could easily get a $500 ticket on a cruise ship, I could get in there, I could hack their network and I could try to I don't know take the controls over or something right, and like give me a million in bitcoin and I'll release your ship. But the security, especially for the critical systems on the ship, must be pretty.
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, it's basically uh, port security and vlan. Um, where it chooses the vlan you plug it in, it identifies the vice and it puts it in the correct vlan. So you know your laptop plugging in is not going to match any of the things it needs to and you're going to be put into a quarantine VLAN.
Speaker 1:And I'm guessing it's layers upon layers of security, right Like layered security to like. It's not just Mac learning at layer two, port address security, they're doing all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so they're doing where they're like when you're.
Speaker 1:I don't want to reveal their security, like I don't want to reveal the hotel surface and give people ideas, but it does profile.
Speaker 3:So like when you connect, okay, it knows. Hey, it's a Windows machine, you know it doesn't have a lot of. It is certificate based. Hey, store only allowing certain CAs. Okay, well, you don't have the cert.
Speaker 1:It's like modern security. Jeff, I think you were walking me through that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is standard. Nac is what he's talking about, Network Access Control, A lot of 802.1X stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And all cert-based and the actual guest is completely separate. I guess they call it an air gap.
Speaker 2:So you're obviously not running something like MPLS out. There Is a lot of SD-WAN on these. I would assume you'd be large SD-WAN.
Speaker 1:Is it dual WAN? When you say SD-WAN, I think multiple WAN connections.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that's the actual interesting part. So traditionally, some larger ships will have two or three of what they call traditional satellites at you know 500 milliseconds. And then, um, cruise lines started putting in starlink, and you know what a lot of people think starlink they're like oh yeah, that thing that you know I paid a couple hundred dollars for and I I sync it with my phone and you know, I got my one satellite. No, no, no, no, it's not like that at all. Maritime is different.
Speaker 1:So what a lot of the ships had is they had 12 starlings and channel bonding on that yes, when you say 12, like 12 dishes on the ship, well, uh, they were each connected to a satellite. Like I don't know anything about SATCOM.
Speaker 3:Okay, I'm not big into the SATCOM part, but when it handed off to the network. There are 12 separate connections, Wow 12. Wan connections, basically Well, 12 and then three of the traditional. Wow. So what happened is a lot of SD-WAN providers are going to have problems trying to manage 15 separate connections. So there was a service that the cruise ships usually do. That is basically an aggregator. They plug all these things in and then they hand you off an Ethernet port and they sort of do it in the background.
Speaker 1:Isn't that interesting. Like none of the SD-WAN providers thought to create a 15 channel, like when, well, you know, it's like you know.
Speaker 3:Why would you like? You know like two, okay, cool, all right.
Speaker 1:Three, all right four now, why do they have so much? Is it to kind of overcome the latency of satellite?
Speaker 3:and well, it's, it's, it's, uh. So traditional satcom, like the traditionals, were bi-directional satellites. Uh, the starlink are unidirectional, so they only go one way you can only send or receive at a time.
Speaker 1:Is that what you mean?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and what they basically said Starlink said was well, however many satellites you have, two-thirds of those need to go to upload. So like, for example, if you had 12, then 8 are upload and 4 are download.
Speaker 2:I wonder why specifically upload. I would have actually thought it would have been the opposite of that.
Speaker 3:I would have thought I did too Well. Apparently with satellites the upload really sucks.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So they need more of it.
Speaker 1:There's no trick around the latency stuff right Like if you have 12 WAN connections. Does that make your 500 millisecond latency any better?
Speaker 3:So what's different is Starlink is low Earth orbit satellites, so they're anywhere from like 150 to maybe 250. As opposed to what?
Speaker 1:geosynchronous.
Speaker 3:Oh no, as, like your typical, satcom is going to be around 500 milliseconds, but since the Starlink is low Earth orbit, you're getting 150 to 250 milliseconds.
Speaker 1:Because they're lower than, yeah, the other side. Yeah, like I kind of remember it's funny. I used to be a comcast cable guy and we'd have to learn like stuff, I want to say like geosynchronous work, but it was like 22 500 something. I forget what it was, but it was like you know the distance between. So I didn't realize that starlink is low earth orbit. You get better latency, which is pretty and like I mean, if you're out, what are people doing?
Speaker 1:So I was thinking of this earlier, like I went on a cruise. It was probably 2011. And I don't even know if I had a smartphone at the time. Right, like I'm an old guy, this was a long time ago. I know I didn't have the internet. So you know, today it's like, well, I got to document it, I got to get on, exactly, I got to show Instagram and TikTok that I'm on this thing, and so it's funny how, just in those 10 or 12 years, you have to have internet, no matter where you are, even if you're in the middle of the ocean, just so you can show people what you're doing. Does that come? I know it depends, but does that come with your ticket?
Speaker 3:Are you paying extra for internet. So where a lot of the cruise lines are moving to is free internet, but it's what I will call freemium internet. Yeah, it's where the they'll give you the base level absolutely free so you can get some wi-fi. But you know then thinking about, oh, oh, you want it faster, you want more uploads. You know you need to pay for that, but right now, but right now, and any internet you have to pay for.
Speaker 3:And the thing that that that really got me was they don't only charge the customers for internet, they charge the crew. Oh really, and I was like, I was like, really, that that's that kind of sucks. And then I thought about it. So there's probably maybe one to two thousand crew members, so you're having another, you know, 1,000 or 2,000 people on your Wi-Fi. That's how much crews on a ship. Huh, depends on the size of the ship. Wow, yeah, you know. And then it's like, oh, yeah, you're going to charge, you're going to charge. There are a lot better rates than the customers. Yeah, but still, you're going to charge them something.
Speaker 1:So is wireless the biggest, I guess, challenge, because Jeff said it's all metal, it's a Faraday cage, it's, you know, like running a data center probably isn't a huge deal. Land communication, whatever Is wireless like? Did you have anything to do with the wireless or is that a completely separate?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so no for the wireless. I wasn't the one doing the site surveys, but a lot, of, lot of it, you know, is the good and bad side of of steel is reflection. So it's going to take the signal and it's going to start reflecting everywhere. So it's a way to get signal around as well. You know it's not okay, it's not preferred you know, because I mean, it's non-porous.
Speaker 3:so you know, like if it was, if it was concrete or drywall, the signal would go through and then it would, just, you know, eventually die. It's non-porous, so you know, like if it was concrete or drywall, the signal would go through and then it would just, you know, eventually die. Here it's just bouncing off everywhere, and this is one of the ones where they, you know, they use more APs to sort of cover these things.
Speaker 2:More APs turn the antenna strength down.
Speaker 3:The other big limiting factor was you know, in a lot of places you know you can use all the channels, including DFS, but on a cruise ship you can't. We have radar, oh yeah, weather radar. So now we're stuck to Uni 1 and Uni 3. So all the channels in Uni 2 and Uni 2 Extended Because of radar? Yeah, because it interferes with radar and the ships use radar so is.
Speaker 2:Is radar at the the higher frequency range or lower frequency? I would assume it'd be lower frequency right, uh, in in five gigahertz.
Speaker 3:Oh, it isn't a five gigahertz range no it's the five.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay yeah, yeah, that that could. That could definitely cause some issues with your wireless. That that's interesting. I wouldn't. I wouldn't have even thought about that yeah, and neither did I.
Speaker 3:You know, these are just things that I just didn't think of and obviously if you're only running Uni1 and Uni3, you're not going to be able to do much channel bonding Right, you know, maybe 40 megahertz channels and that's it. You know you're not going to be getting gig Wi-Fi you're not going to be getting gig Wi-Fi.
Speaker 2:Well, I would assume that part of the challenges with satellite is that satellite's not great in terms of a dense number of individuals and you've got to make sure that the ship's communication obviously is going to take priority, which I assume. What do you do? Dedicated satellite specifically for internal communication, or they all share the same?
Speaker 3:They all share the same, but the uh guest is, I believe it's policed yeah, it's rate limited.
Speaker 1:I was gonna ask about loss or like policing. Yeah, because you want to give critical systems priority, right? Yeah yeah, over some schmuck surfing netflix in the pool well, I was actually gonna.
Speaker 2:That's one of the things I was curious about is, from a security perspective, in the wireless there, did you have any rules in terms of what they were allowed to go to? Were you blocking things or rate limiting things that were high bandwidth?
Speaker 3:So they had plans you could choose from. Once the premium was there they're top tier and you could do Zoom calls. You can do whatever you want top tier and you could.
Speaker 2:You know you can do zoom calls, you can do whatever you want. Now, was it 150 milliseconds that's? I guess that's that's sufficient to be able to actually do a wipe call. I mean, I think it's 300 milliseconds is where you start to really run into issues, yeah, where you actually notice it. But what was, what was it like for you working on that stuff, did you? Was it a noticeable latency on any equipment you were working on?
Speaker 3:so. So the first ship I went on only had the traditional satellites. It didn't have starlink yet and that was painful yeah, I bet because because, yeah, I noticed it. I I noticed it a lot, but when I went on the ones with starlink it was just noticeable enough. And and that's me, you know. So I'm a network engineer, so, like these are the kinds of things I noticed. Like I noticed my own home Wi-Fi when I go it's not as fast.
Speaker 3:You know, and I have gig, wireless gig connections and if something's a little off, I'm like let me check my router. But you know it was fast, but you could still tell it. You could still tell when I went around and asked people there were people just working and they're like when Starlink, the internet's great. I love this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would suspect Starlink. I would bet Starlink made a huge difference to the cruise ship industry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, most definitely.
Speaker 2:Because it does mean that people who normally would not be able to go for the length of a cruise because of work or whatever, now if you've got to work from home job, you can work from anywhere.
Speaker 3:Yep Work from anywhere. Yeah, you know, with a nice drink in your hand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what about regulatory stuff?
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, go ahead oh no, no, I wanted to go kind of down the regulatory cyber compliance route.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was just curious if there was stuff that was different regulatory when it comes to regulations. It was maybe surprising to you, because it was. You know this ship is traveling from one part of the globe to another. Like I know, wireless, for example. You've got different standards for wireless depending on the country that you're in. How does that work on a cruise ship, I guess?
Speaker 3:So it's usually where it's based out of. Yeah, okay, so if we have a ship that's based out of Spain, then Spain. If it's based out of the US, we use US channels, right right right but still DFS off, and that was globally. It didn't matter.
Speaker 1:Wait, wait. This sounds fascinating to me. So there's different wireless frequencies. You can use in different parts of the world is that? Is that what you're saying, and you have to change depending on?
Speaker 3:I didn't know that and what's dfs? Uh, it's, I don't know, the death I'm trying to remember.
Speaker 2:I'm not trying to remember what it stands for as well, you said dynamic frequency selection it's dynamic, yeah, it's. It's basically what do you tell it? You tell it hey, choose the channel that's best for you. Now you're like nope, you have to. Yeah, what?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, and those were what they consider Uni 2 and Uni 2 Extended in the 5 gigahertz range, and then non-DFS channels are Uni 1 and Uni 3.
Speaker 1:So I guess this is like an IEEE question or whoever the hell sets those regulations. But what's the thinking behind regulating wireless channels regionally? What's the thinking behind regulating wireless channels regionally, and I guess why I'm asking? That is like if Spain is using a particular frequency and Portugal's using it, or you know, and the US like they're not going to be physically close enough to interfere with each other.
Speaker 3:It's not a bad interference, I guess. Right, yeah, it's more or less available channels and what you can do in airspace, oh what?
Speaker 1:they're using in a particular area, like maybe their air traffic control uses different frequencies than ours?
Speaker 3:Well, as far as there are a set number of channels, like, the best one that I can compare to is in 2.4. There are 14 channels and everyone's like, oh, we'll use 1.6 and 11. Right channels and everyone's like, oh, we'll use one, six and eleven. Right, you know. And in and in the us, I think, I think we use up to 12, 12 or 13, but, like in other countries, they can use 14 I guess I don't understand why it's different in different countries.
Speaker 1:If I mean, the air is the same anywhere on the planet, physics is the same, so why would it be different? This might be a dumb question, but I don't know why they would change. I'm giving my speculation regionally, but you know what I mean because they're geographically dispersed. What's the point of regulating those things, gotcha?
Speaker 2:well, like will was saying, though, on the cruise ship, you had to be careful because it could interfere with uh, you know, with uh the radars, right so in other countries.
Speaker 2:I would assume there's different frequencies they use for their radio channels, different things that they do and you know just different regulations that are kind of grandfathered in that those frequencies have already been allocated to some other service. I mean, you think about the 900 megahertz phones that we use for the longest time and then 2.4 gigahertz phones and all that stuff. Yeah, they started interfering with wireless for a while there. Um, I assume it's probably like that. Other countries. It's speculation. I bet gpt can answer that for me.
Speaker 1:But again another comcast cable guy story. But I remember going to a house every time their phone, their cordless phone, ring in the house the internet was about, because the cordless base just happened to be on the same exact frequency, the 2.4 frequency, that the so, yeah, that that's. That's interesting. I didn didn't realize. I learned something. Is there any special? So I'm trying to parse. This sounds much like regular network engineering. If you're a network engineer you could work on a ship. Some of the differences seem to be satellite communications. There's latency and bandwidth and bonding of 15 channels and stuff like that. Wireless is going to be tough because of all the metal uh surfaces. Is there anything else that stands out? That's like completely different than any other networking job you had well, uh, more, more or less it was uh, newer technologies.
Speaker 3:So, for example, a lot of the um, a lot of companies I work for you were sort of that traditional data center with the sort of core distribution, you know, aggregate hierarchy, and a lot of the ships are moving to fabrics, where everything is a fabric, yeah, and basically including out to the access switch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really collapses core. Yeah, exactly, collapse core, collapse backbone, the whole thing's collapsed. Something that was also interesting and I didn't think of this is yeah, exactly collapse, core collapse, backbone, the whole thing's collapsed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, something that was also interesting and I didn't think of this is different ships may use different vendors, like a lot of them have a dual vendor strategy. So ship a could be you know, you know cisco, or, and ship b could be aruba, or, you know, ship b could be juniper, and and everything on it would be Juniper, everything on it would be Cisco. And I was like why would you do that? And then someone was like well, if one of the vendors has some zero-day vulnerability, then we don't have all of our ships vulnerable, we only have the ones that have that equipment.
Speaker 1:And I was like that's a good idea ones that have that equipment and I was like, so that's a good idea. So I guess another ships are multi-vendor. You're not going to have, like, say, cisco and juniper data center and then and then everybody but wireless, like it's going to be one throat to choke one yeah except for like firewalls and sd-wan. Yeah, those, those were the things that were different vendors it's easier to manage, probably right like just have all one unified solution in an environment like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what about power on the ship? I mean, I know that I would assume it's PDU A, pdu B, that's on two different circuits and they color code the actual.
Speaker 3:I call them pigtails, you know the ones you put in the rack. You plug, yeah, you plug one red, one blue in.
Speaker 1:Do you have any say over the? So? Like, at places I worked, you know there was architects that kind of made forward thinking, design, design decisions on. Like, okay, in our next refresh we're going to go with this vendor solution for these reasons. Like, did you have really like, hey guys, you know, I I see a gap here. I think we could do better on the next refresh cycle maybe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was there there over that, yeah there was only one, even though I was an architect. There were 15 other people on my team who were all architects, which you know. I, I, I joke. Uh, you remember the qos thing is if everything is ef, nothing is ef if everybody's architects, you know so. So there were. There are junior architects, senior architects and principal architects so you get architect instead of engineer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I got you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the job was half architecture and then half project engineer, sort of thing, you know, and they had what? They split them up into two big teams and I started on the ship side team and then moved to security, which is considered shore side, which includes terminals.
Speaker 2:Now, did you guys do security on each ship, or did everything get trumped back to the data center and security was done there?
Speaker 3:No, everything is on the ship.
Speaker 2:I figured you would probably split tunnel it for most of them and everything there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there were very few things that actually went back to the shore. There were some things that did, but obviously with latency, everything that can be on the ship is on the ship interesting.
Speaker 2:So you're, you're talking servers and all that stuff, so you're not going. That's why you you said, when you said data center, I'm thinking, okay, he means racks. I didn't realize. You meant data center, data centers that, yeah, that does make sense. And it is a floating data center because, yeah, you're right, you can't dial home, you know, back to the, you can't do a hub and spoke topology on that.
Speaker 3:Everything's a hub. Yes, we can refer to on-prem data centers. Everyone has an on-prem data center.
Speaker 1:What do changes look like? So I wanted to talk about change management and then get into outages as I'm thinking through this. So an outage is an example. I don't know If an application goes down in a data center, oh boo-hoo, customers can't reach their thing. I can't get my cat pictures for an hour, I can't process my Visa card, like okay, that sucks. But when you're on a cruise ship and your survival, like the 7,000 or 10,000 people on the ship, their survival depends on those systems working which rely on the network. I mean there must have been outages. Has you get a call like hey, everything's down, what do we do?
Speaker 3:That's so awful. I was in architecture, I wasn't operational.
Speaker 2:More break-fix.
Speaker 3:Yeah, somebody else would get that call yeah.
Speaker 1:But there's outages at sea, I guess, is what I'm getting at. Yeah, massive failures or bad change that gets pushed overnight yeah.
Speaker 3:And they try to do things when they're docked, uh, uh, depending on the, depending on the risk of it, and if they can't do it while they're docked, they're going to do it, like at like two o'clock in the morning. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:And it's a self-contained data center, so really if it breaks it, it almost doesn't matter. If someone can get to it too much, it doesn't have to get home.
Speaker 3:And the IT officers are there on board.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I guess that's what I'm getting at Like if your thrusters and your engines and your navigation relies on the network. I've worked in global data centers that completely melted Like everything's down. Holy crap, something really bad happened. You know, I'm sitting at my desk and people can't get the applications. It sucks. We're going to lose a lot of money but we're not out in the middle of the unforgiving sea, dead in the water literally. I mean I guess that happens right Like awful work. Outages happen your networks never break.
Speaker 3:Well, no, no, no Network outages happen, but I still think there are some systems that are not on the network and that's just for that reason. It's very smart, right.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of what I was digging at a little bit earlier, like the segmentation of critical systems and um. You wouldn't want them traversing. You know the the Netflix delivery um system. So, like you, you touched on big changes happening at port, which is which is smart. So I mean, I guess you're you know there's change management management, right, I guess you have to like submit changes to a review board and put in a change ticket and pick a window and and all that fun stuff right and pick a window that the it officer agrees with.
Speaker 3:They are you know, if you don't get the it officer's approval, you can't, you can't do it. They know when the ship is going to be in the right place in order to do this now.
Speaker 2:Do you want?
Speaker 3:to and sorry go ahead what I was going to say is now, when the ship is in port, it's a little different because, um, they have, basically, from the gangway we'll get a fiber connection into the terminal. Yeah, so we're not. We're not using the satellite now?
Speaker 2:is that in every country, or is that mainly in its home port?
Speaker 3:uh in, in countries where, where the port is, where we have a presence and sometimes, um, if we have a relationship with uh, the port of the country, what they will give us is just an internet connection, which is fine. I mean, we have the sd-wan, it'll connect over. Yeah, makes sense. What would you guess is the number one revenue generator on a cruise ship? Alcohol and gambling. That's my guess. Gambling the casino? Yeah, like, like those casinos, you cannot have an outage. Yep, you know, like, even during normal times, they don't want outage in the casinos, because those casinos are open 24 hours a day and they are the cash cows, people you love to gamble and feed them the free drinks, and that's what they make a lot of money in.
Speaker 1:That's their big gen.
Speaker 2:It's funny you bring that up, because one of the things I was thinking about as we've been talking here and you kind of talked about some of the other parts of the network that are on a cruise ship A cruise ship sounds a lot like a casino because in the same way that a casino has a hotel attached to it usually and has guest accommodations and they've got yeah, you've got to do all the point of sale stuff You've got to do I assume there's tons of media stuff that you had to handle with in-room entertainment stuff and that's all IP.
Speaker 2:It's really similar in the casino thing. So to me it sounds like one of the really nice things about a job like working on a cruise ship or working in a casino is that in reality you've worked in I don't know half a dozen, a dozen different industries that are all kind of combined in one. You've done data center, you've done hospitality, you've done point of sale stuff, you've done wireless and all that. We've asked a lot of questions but there's probably stuff we didn't think to ask. What's something that you think that would really be like for the people listening would be a real surprise, or maybe something we should have asked, that we didn't think to.
Speaker 3:Oh, like I said, the big thing for me was just how many people it is. You know we say, like you know, floating data center, but it's almost like a floating city, floating campus. You know there are APs everywhere, like even in crew areas, so the crew only areas. You know every single crew member has their own room, so sometimes they bug with people, but you know they have their own rooms. They have, you know, know, their own mess hall.
Speaker 3:they, you know, have their own bars and all these places are still lit up with wireless yeah and like on some, I think on some of the smaller ships they had probably like four to five hundred aps and some of the larger ships it was a few thousand and I I just at the time I was like wow, a few thousand access points. I thought that was really crazy.
Speaker 1:People can fit on a big ship, including crew. What's a big ship? 10,000? I have no idea.
Speaker 3:Probably like 5,000 or 6,000 people, not a really big ship. A lot of people to have to worry about.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate you coming on here, will, but this has been really interesting. I've I brought this up to a couple of different people and all of them kind of said the same thing, which is everything thought about networking on a cruise ship, so it's been really enlightening to me and I a lot of cool stuff to think about.
Speaker 3:Well, the other part, just you know. One more thing was when it's moving, like what? Like when we think of satellites, right, we, okay, well, I'm stationary and the satellites are moving On a ship, you're moving, yeah, and the satellites are moving. So at times the bandwidth, the latency is all variable at variable times.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that includes hey, if it's raining, we're probably going to get probably less bandwidth.
Speaker 2:Which is why, like you said, self-contained, each of them is really self-contained.
Speaker 3:Self-contained. It's just the fact that there are two things that are moving at the same time. I thought that was really interesting as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is fascinating. Like I said, I had never really thought about the fact that it's got to be a moving, self-contained data center, and it makes perfect sense, right? You can't be reliant on SaaS applications. You can't be reliant on your hub sites.
Speaker 1:Will. Is this a good job for a network engineer out there who's looking like? Would you recommend being a network engineer on a cruise ship? Looking back, it's not your job anymore. Was this a good experience, or are you like guys avoid? Like the plane, it's awful. Like what? 29.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, it depends, so you know, it depends on whether it's ship side or shore side.
Speaker 3:So the ship side, you know, I would say for younger people, for younger network engineers, that that may be great because, you know, if you don't really have anything tying you down, then you can go on these dry docks, you can travel 50% of the time and you can get to see different countries, you can see different ports and you get to basically build this network on a ship.
Speaker 3:For me I was later in my career, with wife and children, so being gone 50% of the time wasn't going to work. So being at the shore side kind of gave me the benefits of okay, well, I still have a job, that you know I had traveled maybe 25% of the time, so a lot lower, but you know, I still got to get out there and I got to, you know, experience it and it was, it was great, like the best thing I loved about it and it, it. It's just a very simple thing is like when I was done for the day, I'd go walk up and down the ship grab some ice cream and you know just, you know just these very simple things and just people watch.
Speaker 2:That's a fun, not a bad life, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, uh well, thank you so much for coming on. We learned a ton um this, like I said, 170 something episodes in and, uh, you, you brought something new to the table, which hasn't been easy for us to do, so I really appreciate you coming on and teaching us all about, uh, cruise ship networking, um, for all things. Art of net eng you can check out our link tree that's link tree forward slash. Art of net edge we have a merch store, we got our website, we got our podcast feed with a bunch of cool shows, including this one, and we also have our discord server called it's all about the journey. Did I get that right? Yeah, it's all about the journey.
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