Quote Originally Posted by TuffStuffMcGruff View Post
Why not? Please explain? I recognize that digital signals are different, but what ae the limitations.
radio waves are one-directional, you have a powerful sender and the receiver is entirely passive, it gets the full load of info and just picks the channel it wants, the internet has no channel, contact is usually established by the user, whose device has to request the info from the server the website is on, that means the iranian or whoever would have to send data to the ship, no normal WLAN device can send data over hundreds of miles/kilometers, they would never get a connection...

Cellphone networks have more range afaik but like I said they can heat up your ear by about a degree Celsius already, given that you fed them more energy and could extend their range far enough to cover a few hundred kilometers, they might heat up your entire body by a few degrees if you were close so that doesn't sound very helpful to me either, and that's ignoring the heavily increased energy needs in the first place.

But that's generally the problem, the end user device has to send all sorts of data, requests, answers etc. to your ship in order to use the internet so the ship would have to handle hundreds, thousands or even millions of connections and all these devices would need strong enough signals to send data to the ship.

Might work with certain wavelengths and specially designed devices for people living near the coast but then you'd have to import those specially designed devices first etc. etc.