Washington State Ferries has been piloting a system for offring Wi-Fi Internet access on some of their routes -- mainly the "commuter" ones.
It sounds like they are making good progress.
There are, of course, challenges with making wi-fi work on a solid-metal boat built for strength. In the end, though, that's mostly just a matter of how many access points you need.
The trickier part is ship-to-shore. You don't want to bounce off satellites, if at all possible, because it adds significant latency to the connection (geo-synchronous orbit is about 22,000 miles above the equator; speed of radio signals is 186,000 miles per second; round-trip is up-down-up-down; people can detect 100 millisecond delay; you do the math)
Based on their pilots, they think they can make it work up to 20 miles away from the shore station. Fortunately for them, they have a relatively unobscured path across the Sound on the two routes they've been testing. I hold out little hope that they will ever deploy this on the San Juan Islands routes though, since they weave between the islands. Ah well.
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