Standfirst.... 1 line space after....animin de sequid ut aut que pratus, si omnis dolorum que simporepe sunt perfero FEATURE Text text 34 COVER STORY Closing the connectivity gap Pramod Arora of WMS tells Rebecca Gibson how its engineering expertise, new pricing models and partnerships with mobile carriers and satellite technology providers are helping it to pioneer the way for land-like cellular connectivity on cruise ships at sea Guests sailing onboard Carnival Cruise Line’s Carnival Jubilee experienced a cruise industry first in 2024: they were able to access 5G cellular connectivity at sea. The offering, which the cruise line said “literally raised the connectivity bar” for its guests and the wider industry, was enabled by remote wireless solutions provider WMS. The 5G service is the latest in a long line of innovations delivered by WMS, which engineers, designs, installs, manages and monitors wireless networks and provides cellular connectivity for cruise operators. “We’re the premier global provider of remote wireless solutions that connect people and businesses in hard-to-reach places around the world,” says Pramod Arora, president and CEO of WMS. “We installed the first-ever commercial cellular network on a cruise ship in 2004 and we were also first in the industry to deliver 2G, 3G, 4G LTE and 5G connectivity over geostationary and medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellite constellations. And in 2024, we became the first to integrate cruise ship cellular connectivity services with Starlink’s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation.” WMS works with all satellite providers and is well positioned to capitalise on new LEO satellite services as they become available. Today, it operates mobile networks on more than 200 ships belonging to 26 cruise lines, providing one million hours of network connectivity and over 226 terabytes of data annually. “More than 80 per cent of ocean-going cruise ships use our networks,” says Arora. “We led the evolution of at-sea cellular connectivity services and experiences, taking them from basic voice calls and text in the early 2000s to a full broadband
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