Our experiences on Regent are that they're not as "high speed" as DSL at home but is decent - quite a bit faster than dialup - I would tend to agree with 1/3-1/2 the speed of DSL.

Regent's internet speed sometimes seems to depend on the position of the ship vs. the position of the satellite. I have literally clicked on "reply" to an email, then picked up a paperback book to pass the time until I could actually type the reply. But that was several years ago, and they seem to be improving the speed at a fairly steady rate.

Royal Caribbean Mariner and Adventure
 

On RC Mariner and Adventure they have around 6 wi-fi spots throughout the ship and a computer lab.

For some reason no one could explain to me I had to choose one or the other at least for a certain set of pre-paid minutes. At per-minute rates, the cost was about 50 cents/minute, but you could buy packages to bring it down to $33/minute (I think 150 minutes for $50.)

The rooms only have wi-fi if they happen to be reasonably close to the hot-spots. Some are, some aren't. But there are a number of common areas with access.

However, when I used some common areas, I felt like the only one with a laptop on the ship while everyone else had a Mai-Tai so it felt weird.

This is better than in the past, but the wi-fi coverage still has a long way to go.

Our laptop experience on Princess, even in the hot spots, has been sketchy.

We did have pretty good service in the internet cafes both last May and September, but we were never really that far from land.

chiming in to say i've used wifi on princess, and it was s-l-o-w. didn't work at all in the cabin, and 'worked,' but as someone else said only in a 1999 kind of way, in the lobby and the on-ship internet cafe. best bet was to find hotspots on land, at least in our experience.

We run our business over the internet and took a SilverSea transatlantic crossing (therefore couldn't use in-port internet cafes since we weren't in port for days on end.) Our cabin was full forward and deck 5. There was no signal issues at all.

We shared the connection (we travel with our own router so I 'fed' the signal to our router and my dh used it.) It was slow but reasonable enough that we could manage. I was able to do all my uploads of photos and my husband would pull down his 1K of messages a day. By downloading and reading things off-line (and composing off line) we were able to manage easily with the 1000 minutes.

The point of the cruise was holiday (and the crossing took us from one client site to another) so we didn't do any deliveries via the internet. That might have been trickier and I'd save those for true high speed in port.

It was a 17 day cruise and it worked well enough for us that we are taking a 28 day cruise next year.

my experience on every ship I have been on is VERY slow

I've been averaging 6 weeks a year on board ships lately, and the one constant that I've seen is that on-board internet access is very slow and very pricey. I have yet to have a high-speed experience.

One problem with the "internet cafe ashore" solution outside your home country is that the keyboard is local. With only two uncommon keys exchanged, my entry speed gets slowed by as much as half -- when a LOT of keys are different (like on a French keyboard), my usage really slowed to a crawl.

i just sailed on the carnival liberty 1 week ago. The wifi is throughout the entire ship including all cabins. The signal was very strong. You could use your own laptop or rent one of theirs. The cost of minutes was .75 cents per minute without a package. The packages were 55.00 for 100 minutes or 100.00 for 250 minutes. There were also deals along the way to add minutes for less once you were signed up in the program. The only downside is the speed was terrible. It reminds me of dial-up even though they call it broadband. Still, it was nice to go on and grab e-mail daily.

Come on Richard, that's part of the fun. :D

Don't you like to play, "Guess where Mommy and Daddy are by their typos!"

We always find an internet cafe on land, and use that one-line time to read fun stuff like FlyerTalk, etc., reserving the internet time on ship for work e-mail. Unfortuntely the ship's computers won't let us access our daughter's myspace: http://www.myspace.com/theblowus

which is by far our favorite spot on the internet. :D She should be rolling over 2,000,000 plays today, or maybe tomorrow.