SATCOMS

Digital Ship June/July 2013 page 12

The future of maritime satcomsDigital Ship recently organised a round table discussion session in Copenhagen, bringing together a panel of four vessel

operators, two communications technology suppliers and one market forecaster to discuss the future development ofsatellite communications in the shipping industry. Amongst a wide range of subjects the debate covered the potential

of high throughput satellites, the growth of VSAT, and where L-band may sit in the new maritime market

DD igital Ship's 2013 round table dis-cussion, titled 'The Future of Mar-itime Satellite Communications'

and hosted by Cobham SATCOM at theformer Thrane & Thrane headquarters inCopenhagen, Denmark, brought togethera panel of seven experts with decades ofexperience in the field of vessel operationsand the application of technology in theshipping environment.

The goal of the discussion was to exam-ine some of the current, emerging andplanned future communications technolo-gies on offer to the maritime market, andto gather opinions on how the develop-ment of these systems might change theoperational environment in coming years.

Digital Ship posed a number of specificquestions to the panel (identified in thetable above right), starting with a look thecurrent market situation for maritimecommunications, and how that startingpoint will influence the new generation ofemerging technologies.

Digital Ship – Have we yet reached astage where we could say that broadbandis something that’s the norm in maritime,or are we still very much a ‘dial-up’industry? What are the major factors thatare driving implementation of broad-band, but also hindering the implemen-tation of higher speed systems?

CI: It’s a very interesting time at themoment, there are really a lot of new tech-nologies arriving on the scene, and I thinkwe’ll be talking about those today, andalso where we’ve been as well.

There have been more fundamentalnew changes happening than in the last 10or 12 years in satellite communicationsthan ever before. The pace of change hasbeen unprecedented. But still, I have tobring us down to earth a little bit – yes, onthe ship operator side you will be verymuch aware of the reality of it, but muchof the discussion could be said to be aspi-rational, so far as the broader commercialmarket is concerned at the moment.

There is really a major bed of the mar-ket which is unaddressed in terms ofbroadband speeds, and the most commonimplementations on most deep sea vesselsare not broadband at the moment. That’ssomething that as a manufacturer I repre-sent as well.

There’s a broad range of systems imple-mented on ships, and really the most com-mon of those are not broadband at themoment. So, for example, at Cobham SAT-COM we have manufactured more than120,000 Inmarsat-Cs.

Inmarsat-C is absolutely the completeopposite of a broadband communicationsystem. It’s operating at less than one kilo-bit, 0.6 kilobits, and there are 150,000 ofthese that are actually in commission,according to Inmarsat.

These only offer minimal data capabili-ty, and yet there are key advantages ofthose systems. The fact that these are textonly means that you’ve got no advertising,no viruses, the information is completelyconcise, you don’t have spam, and youdon’t have e-mail overload. The system isextremely dependable.

SK: Do you know how many of theseactually are used or they are just standingthere?

CI: I think a very high proportion ofthem are used a small amount. I don’tknow the official Inmarsat figures, but youwill find that their volume and turnover isstill in the tens of millions of dollars forInmarsat-C traffic, and none of that is safe-ty, they’re not allowed to charge for anysafety traffic.

But that is a significant amount of traf-fic, that is basically SafetyNET, FleetNETtraffic, and general messaging traffic. Sothat’s just really to set the scene, actuallyit’s the system which is most widely imple-mented, it’s more than 90 per cent of ves-sels, maybe 95 per cent of vessels. In thedeep sea SOLAS area, it’s mandatory for

SOLAS A3 to have Inmarsat-C installed.I just mention that because we have

tremendous focus on the amazing infra-structure which is being put up into spacefor broadband communications, but inactual fact what people are using is verybroad. In terms of dial-up, I took a note,there are more than 30,000 Fleet systems,which are still commissioned, and we’vemanufactured 25,000 Fleet terminals. Youcould probably define those as more dial-up than broadband.

Yet, at the same time we’re seeing thatthe take up of broadband is running at anunprecedented rate. There are still thoughpotentially 30,000 deep sea vessels whichdon’t have any kind of broadband com-munication, FleetBroadband or VSAT sys-tems installed.

Digital Ship – Are the antennas tooexpensive? Because presumably if you’reusing Inmarsat-C or Fleet to do your com-munications it’s cheaper per megabyte todo it with FleetBroadband, for instance?

CI: I think there’s a whole range of fac-tors. If you’re asking what’s driving orhindering the implementation – I don’tthink that hardware cost is the be-all andend-all. Certainly the part of the cycle thatthe industry is in right now is not con-ducive to taking on major new technolo-gies that are not mandatory from a regula-tory perspective.

So maybe we would expect that theindustry will be swinging up over the nextcouple of years. It has been unprecedent-ed, the last couple of years, in terms of thetrading conditions, in terms of the cargorates and the futures rates, these havebeen at an all-time low. We would expectthe market conditions to pick up.

I don’t believe for one thing that they’reparticularly low, the broadband take uprates, but certainly they will get evenstronger in the next couple of years.

The panel – clockwise from left: James Collett, Intelsat; Wei Li, Euroconsult; Søren Krarup-Jensen, Eitzen Chemical; Rob O’Dwyer,Digital Ship; Chris Insall, Cobham SATCOM; Peter Faurhøj, Maersk Supply Service, Pelle Stroby, A. P. Møller – Maersk; Allan

Rasmussen, TORM

The panel consisted of (abbreviations in brackets):(CI) - Chris Insall, manager commercial programmes,

Cobham SATCOM(PF) - Peter Faurhøj, asst gen manager navigation & communication systems,

Maersk Supply Service(PS) - Pelle Stroby, senior category manager Maersk procurement,

A. P. Møller - Maersk(AR) - Allan Rasmussen, vice president fleet and newbuilding support,

TORM(JC) - James Collett, director of mobility services,

Intelsat(WL) - Wei Li, senior consultant,

Euroconsult(SK) - Søren Krarup-Jensen, general manager crew (marine HR),

Eitzen Chemical

Who’s who: The Panel

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SATCOMS

Digital Ship June/July 2013 page 14

In terms of what is driving the market,the requirement for data, the demand forbandwidth is unstoppable – globally, out-side of any kind of individual verticalmarket. The uptake of smartphones, forexample, I’ve seen industry estimates ofthe number of smartphones in service cur-rently at around a billion, and that we’regoing to have in two or three years anoth-er two or three billion. I’ve even seen num-bers from Cisco saying higher than that.

That fuels the demand to access datafrom the end user perspective, and in ourindustry that’s most visible in somethinglike passenger, when people go on board avessel with their devices they need con-nectivity. An average family brings withthem anything up to 10 devices, but a fam-ily of four will bring at least four or fivedevices with them.

That demand is reflected across the basein terms of crew and other staff on a vessel;the captain, first engineer, the chief engi-neer, the chief officer – these people alsohave an expectation now of data. So that,above and beyond anything else, thedemand for data is the key driver, as I see it.

In terms of what’s hindering the indus-try, it’s probably mostly where we are inthe industry cycle. There is a doublewhammy of cargo rates, and also the effectof high bunker costs, so we have anunprecedented situation at the moment.That does affect purchasing conditions.

Digital Ship – Peter what’s your view onthis? You’re involved in making thesedecisions.

PF: I think it depends on the type ofvessels, and the regions as well. Cruisevessels were of course quite fast to adoptbroadband on board, and the supply ves-sels and tanker vessels also did quite a lotof installations.

Surprisingly enough container vesselshave been very slow to adapt. We did itfor crew retention, and of course businessreasons but that was not the main driver.

Cruise vessels, they do it for their cus-tomers obviously, but I think supply ves-sels and our supply companies and tankercompanies have been driven by business.

There is also a great focus on crewretention. It’s expensive to keep the certifi-cate for these crew members up to date,it’s very expensive to educate a crewmember for supply vessels and tanker ves-sels. So I think there’s been a certainamount of crew retention as a driver forimplementing broadband on these typesof vessels.

Digital Ship – If you take the crew ele-ment out of it, would you run the busi-ness pretty much the same way you donow with a Fleet system?

PF: I think that we would have kept thedial-up version a little bit longer, maybenot until today but a little longer. Actuallywe did do that, because in the beginningthe FleetBroadband terminals and VSATterminals for our vessels were purely forthe crew and for the charterers, it was ademand from them.

We had a lot of complaints from crewmembers saying that ‘most supply vesselshave it, we want it too’. So we had to dothis back in 2007, because otherwise therewas a risk that they would leave the com-pany and go where they could have the

free internet and free telephone calls orcheap telephone calls.

Digital Ship – So would you say that inparticular markets and regions this is thenorm, basically in the markets whereyou’re working?

PF: I think, especially in the beginning,it was for supply vessels, and it was theNorwegians who were the first ones toadopt broadband. Not on all vessels, buton the larger vessels they adopted thisquite fast.

I’ve seen regions, even in Europe, whohave been very slow in adopting broad-band. When you go to, for instance, DigitalShip in Hamburg and you talk to some ofthe German owners, they are still in the test phase of trying aFleetBroadband or a VSAT, and they havedone it for years. Some have been veryslow adopting broadband for their vessels.

Digital Ship – From what Peter is sayingit sounds like a lot of this is reactive; it’sa view that the conditions are such that Ineed to have broadband to keep my crew– would you agree Soren?

SK: I think in Maersk one of the biggestpressures was in the supply vessels. Allthe offshore industry had it, and the char-ters were the same. The crew were very

much together with the charterers. So thatstarted in the offshore industry, and theneverybody else had to follow because itwas the same people we are trying torecruit.

In Eitzen Chemical we got the firstFleetBroadband installed in 2011, and thatwas purely due to retention. Because intoday’s modern world Facebook and e-mail is vital if we want to communicatewith our social network.

If you cannot provide Facebook, and Idon’t think we can even do that today onall our vessels, even though we said thatwe have to, the young guys we want torecruit, the ones who can go fast upthrough their careers, they will not join ashipping company if they cannot just logon to Facebook or have free e-mailing orchatting functions together with their wifeand families.

They need to get a picture when thechild has had a birthday. All these are veryimportant for them. Even though all theseare put up for crew retention, and there isno return of investment on the money youare spending changing to these systems, I

think looking at our satellite communica-tion costs they are going down, especiallyon the vessels trading very frequentlyunder VSAT coverage, because they moreor less have halved the phone communica-tion costs.

The vessels use Skype and MicrosoftLync to communicate with the superin-tendents. So there is also afterwards a costbenefit on it, but I think it’s driven certain-ly by crew retention to begin with.

Digital Ship – Pelle, you’re involved inbuying for the different sectors thatMaersk is involved in, so you see the dif-ferent perspectives we’re talking about.

PS: If we are looking at Maersk, alldeep sea vessels have had broadband forthe last two years. Maersk Line was thelast one coming on to this, and that waspurely for business needs. That was abusiness case that was made that requiredbroadband.

You can say 95 per cent of the usagewas crew welfare, but we could also makea business case which could pay forFleetBroadband, and that has always beenthe problem – finding one single businesscase which can justify the investment. Butwe did it purely on fuel reduction, and onfaster communication of time of arrivaland time of departure.

Digital Ship – When it was installed forcrew retention purposes on some types ofships, was the business use after havingthat system installed helpful in provingyour other business cases?

PS: It’s different, because on supplyvessels and tanker vessels the system wasimplemented as crew welfare, and thatalso means that for many years you had todeliver all the FleetBroadband systems ascrew welfare. So you could not, as such,say ‘I will take a part of it for business use’.

It’s only in the last year or so where weare starting running business communica-tion and applications via that one broad-band system. For Maersk Line that was a les-son learnt, from the beginning it was com-municated that this is a business system, thissystem is implemented because of busi-ness, and the crew will get whatever is left.

If 99 per cent is left then they will get 99 per cent, but they cannot require ordemand any specific part of that channel.

Digital Ship – You mentioned fuel, hasthat been a real game changer, in thatthe huge increases in the cost of fuel

have totally changed the drivers forcommunications?

PS: If you can take fuel into a businesscase you can always make a positive busi-ness case. That has nothing to do withbroadband or communication, that is justa small part of it.

It was simply to get information in amore timely manner, and you could dothat on Inmarsat-C as well. But MaerskLine was lagging two years behind the restof the business unit, and of course therewere a lot of complaints, like Peter said,it’s the same people saying ‘on thatMaersk vessel I will get FleetBroadband,on another Maersk vessel I get nothing’.

We needed FleetBroadband, and nowwe have the possibility of making a busi-ness case. Again, Maersk Line is the firstone to go out of that agreement again, andthe second investment, where VSAT is theprime communication platform, that’s apure business requirement. No crew wel-fare is included in that business case, it’spurely on business communication.

Digital Ship – What is the number onepriority on the business side for the communications?

PS: To sell information to customers.There can be a spin off to crew welfare andother things, but the whole investment iscoloured by one business case on valueadded services to customers.

Digital Ship – Is that one particular typeof information, or is there a variety ofdata being generated that needs to beshared?

PS: It’s one particular kind of information.

Digital Ship – Allan, would you like toshare your experiences in this area?

AR: Five or six years ago, when themarket was doing a lot better, it wasdecided at that time that TORM would dosomething for crew welfare.

The TORM foundation donated anamount to what are called the crew ships’club, and actually the ships’ club pur-chased VSAT antennas for a number of theships. Not all of our ships have beenequipped with VSAT antennas, but anumber of them were.

At that time a contract was made topurchase C-band antennas, they are verybig antennas at 2.5 metres, a very bigdome to have on the monkey island – ittakes up some space, I can tell you.

So VSAT communication was providedfor crew welfare at that time, and TORMwere first movers in that area. Howeverthings have changed, the market istougher now, and also a lot of technologydevelopment has happened in recentyears. So last year we finalised a newagreement and have a new strategy for thecommunication going forward.

We see also now the VSAT bandwidthwe have is lagging very much behind. Forthe agreement we have right now with ourcurrent supplier (before moving toInmarsat’s XpressLink) we have 256 kbps,however that can be shared with up to 10vessels. We also have experience that thecrew purchase their own routers, andinstall them on each deck in order to havewireless networks for their own privatecomputers.

‘The captain, first engineer, the chief engineer, the chief officer – these people also havean expectation now of data’ – Chris Insall, Cobham SATCOM

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We do not recommend that because itwill slow down the network on board –can you imagine having 10 or 15 privatecomputers connected to a wireless net-work with a bandwidth speed that can beshared with up to 10 vessels? The band-width left to each computer is next to nothing. But that is the case we haveright now.

PF: Actually I have seen, on a vesselwith 60 crew members and chartered peo-ple, they had around 160 users online.

Digital Ship – On one vessel?PF: There were smartphones, iPads,

computers. Some of them had two com-puters.

AR: We have really tried to limit it tothe onboard network, the LAN networkon board, but it’s impossible because peo-ple go and buy routers and put them upand so on – and then they will complainabout the speed, of course.

We realised that the C-band coverage,even though it’s supposed to be covering alarge area, the connectivity was notalways as we would have hoped or hadbeen promised it to be. So as I said, lastyear I, together with our procurementteam, invited some other players in the market to bid on this, and we have set a new strategy for our communicationon board.

We have VSAT, or FleetBroadband, orFleet or Sat B or Sat C – we have a hugevariety of systems on board our vessels.But we have now made an agreement withInmarsat that we will have theirXpressLink solution with Ku-band VSATantennas and a FleetBroadband 500 asbackup on all vessels. This is what we areaiming for now.

Digital Ship – Does this solve your prob-lem though, of too many people on asmall amount of bandwidth?

AR: It will not solve that problem, butwe will have a higher speed now, we willhave 128 kpbs committed per vessel, andthat will burst up to 512 kbps or some-thing like that. We also have in that agree-ment this upgrade to the Ka-band withdouble speeds after a couple of years,bursting up to one megabit.

This is a lease agreement, so we will notpurchase our own equipment as we have

done in the past. We have realised that thevalue of that, when we have sold a coupleof our vessels last year, the value of thatequipment is next to nothing. Of coursewe have to tell the ships’ clubs that, andthey don’t understand us.

So this is what we have chosen as astrategy. The agreement we made fiveyears ago was supplier driven, it was thesupplier telling us what you can get. Whatwe did last year is we went in looking atwhat TORM wants, what our strategy willbe going forward, and defined that. Thenwe had these suppliers bidding in on ourrequirements.

We also have a defined SLA (servicelevel agreement) now, which we didn’thave in the old contract. There was noSLA, it was based on best effort, which canmean a lot of things. But now we have anSLA, and Inmarsat guarantees 99.5 percent uptime on the combined solution,and we have flat rate unlimited data.

Digital Ship – Where does the Ka-bandoption sit into that? Will you wait to seeif that’s proven, or as soon as that’slaunched do you get switched over to Ka-band? How does it work, the GlobalXpress element of the deal?

AR: When they have their system readyI believe we will run a couple of test ves-sels and see how it works out before we go‘all in’ on the remaining fleet. That is usu-ally how we do it. We have also done itwhen we are converting to Inmarsat now,because some of the old C-band antennasfrom our previous contract will need to beconverted into Ku-band antennas.

We’ll use the same dome, but I thinkthe BUC (block up converter) or someequivalent needs to be changed in order toprovide a signal.

We will do a couple of test vessels tosee how the installation goes, is it runningsmoothly, are there any difficulties orproblems experienced after the conver-sion, and so on. We will run for, say, onemonth, and if there are any problems we’llsee if they can be rectified. If there aren’tany problems at all then we’re all in.

Digital Ship – Will you have the sameSLA on the Ka-band that you have currently?

AR: Yes, that will be under the same SLA.

Digital Ship – James, you’re providingservices to a lot of the new maritimeVSAT providers we’ve had over the lastdecade – what’s your view on the rise of VSAT and broadband within theindustry?

JC: I think if you look at how far broad-band has penetrated in commercial ship-ping today, I would say it’s been prettylimited, which from our perspective isvery positive, because we see plenty ofgrowth ahead of us.

Arguably there are a lot of technicallycapable terminals out there today thatcould do broadband, although I don’tthink they would meet the ITU definitionfor broadband, which isn’t 432 kbps, it’shigher than that.

But if you look at those 32,000FleetBroadband terminals that are outthere today, only a very few of them Iwould say are commercially enabled forbroadband. They have price packagesassociated with them, which mean that theusers use them in a very constrained way.

I think when you talk about the marketbeing ‘broadband enabled’, we mean ‘Isthere an always-on, fixed-fee, all-you-can-eat type subscription in place?’ That’swhat I call a broadband connection. That’swhat most people accept today as broad-band connectivity.

There may be some fair use policy asso-ciated with it. There may be some type oftraffic management, but it is pretty muchthat you can do what you want and youcan use it in the same way as you can a ter-restrial broadband connection.

So I think in that respect, we’ve still gota long way to go, and I would argue thatfrom both a commercial and a technicalperspective, in terms of getting that broad-band connection, then VSAT is the waypeople are moving. I think that market isincreasingly gaining momentum for avariety of reasons.

In the past, Ku-band coverage was verypoor, and that was probably part ofTORM’s decision to go for C-band. Butoperators like ourselves have been invest-ing in providing coverage over the oceanswhere that hasn’t existed in the past.

To your point about Ku-band antennas(potentially pricing customers out of themarket for VSAT), they’ve come downdramatically in price. It’s not so long agothat the price will have been $40,000 to$50,000 for a Sea Tel or Orbit antenna, andnorth of that, as they were the only playersin the market. The market has becomecompetitive, quality standards have risen,and that’s driven uptake.

The introduction of shared platformshas also been a key change that’s drivenmaritime VSAT adoption. In the past,when people used to buy VSAT, they usedto buy dedicated connections, and thatpredefined the customer set for them,because only certain customers, typicallyoffshore platforms or rigs, could afford tobuy dedicated capacity.

Now, with shared platforms, you canhave fleets sharing their bandwidth, youcan have integrators sharing their band-width across multiple customers – allleading towards a much more economicalsolution for the vessel.

All these things have been pushingVSAT forward, and because the markethas been scaling you’ve now got far more

standardisation. Installing a VSAT is notthe headache it used to be. We’ve seenMaersk roll VSAT out across hundreds ofvessels, and manufacturers and their serv-ice agents are getting closer to makingVSAT installation much more like fittingan L-band system.

So there’s a bunch of things which arefacilitating VSAT to move forward in away that it’s never moved before. I comeback to speed and predictable cost per-formance. That’s the way the market isheading. If you want broadband on thoseterms, then you have to buy VSAT,whether it’s Ku-band VSAT, Ka-bandVSAT or something else. They’re the solu-tions that fix users’ costs.

Digital Ship – So is it just the price issuethat’s the main obstacle that’s left toVSAT adoption? Is that what’s stoppingpeople from adopting these systemstoday?

JC: I think there’s a bunch of other fac-tors that people are looking for which pre-viously you could only get at L-band,which are becoming far more acceptablenow around VSAT. For example, the easeof installation and the predictability of thecoverage. Improvements there are con-tributing to VSAT being a far more palat-able choice than in the past.

Digital Ship – Wei, what’s your perspec-tive on this? You do market research onhow these things have changed in thelast few years, what’s your view?

WL: Our view, I believe, is differentfrom you since you’re directly immersedin the field. You have many concreteexamples, and we are really looking moreat the financial performance, companyreports, etc.

If you look at the macro level of themarket, I think as of today there are allkinds of technologies in the maritime mar-ket, there are more than 300,000 satelliteterminals in the maritime sector across thefrequency spectrum – C-band, Ku-band,L-band, and even VHF.

But how many are broadband capableterminals? At Euroconsult we have a dif-ferent definition of broadband. The 432kbps that was mentioned, very few com-panies or ships can support that.

So I think today most people have(even on VSAT) between 64 to 128 kilobitsper second. We say that if your service ismore than 128 kbps, then it’s broadband.

Under that definition, we see today themarket share of broadband terminals isapproximately 10 to 15 per cent of thetotal, meaning another 85 to 90 per cent ofactive terminals (active meaning they arein use at least one time during a quarter ofthe year) are not broadband.

How about the future? I think, as wasmentioned, there will be the introductionof new systems, higher capabilities, newfrequencies, and we do believe that thesenew systems will drive the market.

As many of you know, in the past, one vessel could have several differentterminals on board, it could have a Fleet,it could have Inmarsat-C, it could have a VSAT for different purposes, but Ithink the general trend in the future isthat we will try to get a decreased aver-age number of terminals available onboard each vessel.

Søren Krarup-Jensen, Eitzen Chemical; Pelle Stroby, A. P. Møller – Maersk; and Allan Rasmussen, TORM

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Digital Ship June/July 2013 page 18

It’s too complicated to manage manysuppliers with different usage policies.One supplier for application, and othersjust for backup. You don’t always need touse backup, but you’re still paying amonthly fee.

So I think in the future, shipowners willtry to combine all these functions into onebroadband terminal – this is becoming abig trend. We believe that many of today’sexisting lower bandwidth terminals willbe integrated into broadband solutions,and they will be replaced gradually.

But on the other side we see severalapplications that do not really need broad-band, for example asset tracking.Container owners can track their shippingcontainers via satellite terminals. This isnot only relevant to maritime transporta-tion. The same container can be used intrain transportation, so a standardisedtracking solution is required.

There are some specialised operators inthe United States, they are doing assettracking and machine to machine applica-tions using really low bandwidth, L-bandor VHF, and they are close to having glob-al coverage.

For these applications we see a stronggrowth trend because more and moresmart devices will exist. These devices arereally small and don’t require 1 Mbpsaccess, they just need several kilobits per second.

They are low cost, I believe the terminalcost is approximately between $50 and$100, and depending on the scale of yourbusiness you can have a monthly fee aslow as $3 per month.

So there are several large and growingmarkets for these kinds of applications inthe future. On one side there are broad-band maritime applications, they will inte-grate everything else today running ondifferent applications. On the other sidethere will be an increasing number ofsmart devices where it is not really neces-sary to be connected with broadband,using really low bandwidth.

In the middle we have some narrow-band provision, for example InmarsatE&E products are losing their marketshare which is being replaced with broad-band or low band services.

On the other hand, we know there arestill regulatory requirements, because inthe maritime sector safety is key and regu-latory issues exist. There are discussions atthe regulatory organisations, normallythey take years and years, like what we seefor the new GMDSS.

I think Inmarsat is working hard to geta FleetBroadband certificate for this safetycommunication, but I think it’s not reallyimmediate, like in the next month or next week.

But I think even with that certificate, Ithink many of the Inmarsat-Cs are justrecently sold so the ship owners will notreally change and buy a new one. I thinkthe general long term future is that therewill be broadband and very low data rateterminals, but in the midterm perspectiveI think everything that exists today willstill exist for quite some time.

In terms of the market inhibitors, youmentioned the price, which is important.For this discussion, most of you areEuropean companies, but I speak with a lot of Asian companies who don’t invest

much towards the crew’s welfare.So price is one factor, and another

inhibitor is the fact that not everybody islooking for broadband services. It’s a com-bination of different factors in this market.But I think in the future, for sure, broad-band will grow and will represent a muchhigher market share of the total marketthan today.

Digital Ship – Is the growth that you seein that steady or is it accelerating?

WL: We see a slowdown for VSAT. Ithink it was accelerating maybe two orthree years ago, but I think from last year,people who are using VSAT, who aremigrating from Inmarsat to VSAT, aremostly high-end customers used to payingmore than $1,000 per month per vessel.

These customers, in terms of number ofcustomers, are limited.

On the other side, I see Inmarsat hasdecreased the price of airtime services.Prices are decreasing, and antennas arebecoming smaller and lighter.

The market is enlarging but it’s enlarg-ing at the lower end. They are not cus-tomers who are paying $3,000 per month.They are looking for broadband, but theyhave just $500 per month.

For the general trends, the ARPU (aver-age revenue per user) will go down, butthe number of installations will grow.

CI: There are still, surprisingly, 9,000Inmarsat-Bs commissioned, and themajority of those are operating at 9.6 kilo-bits. All of the standard e-mail systems,the SkyFile, the Rydex, the AmosConnect,all of these systems have had to evolveand have to support dial-up mode as wellas IP mode.

I guess it is a very strong industry trendthat the operators will not get rid of theold satcoms equipment until the lastminute they have to. This is visible withthe Inmarsat-Bs, and it was the case with-A, when -A was retired. These Bs will stillbe there until the end of 2014.

AR: We have a plan for when we haveupgraded we will deactivate the E&E. TheInmarsat-B or Fleet 77, that will be deacti-vated when we have the combined solu-tion in place. Inmarsat-C, of course, weneed to keep.

Digital Ship – Soren, do you want tocome in on this and give us your view?

SK: I think we are still exploring. Withthe antenna sizes going down, I have actu-ally probably switched my opinion moreto the VSAT systems, because now it’s alsoin a range, moneywise, where it’s benefi-cial. It’s not so difficult to install anymore,like when Allan mentioned five years agoit was a very big job.

One third of our fleet is actually onFleetBroadband with AND Group,where our backup is Fleet 77, and wehave chosen not to decommission the oldsystem because that’s the backup. But ofcourse along the line it will probably bedecommissioned.

We have limitations for the crew. Theyhave to share, like was discussed before,50 per cent of the bandwidth is for busi-ness, and 50 per cent is for the crew. Butthey are limited.

Another third of our fleet is onFleetBroadband with Stratos using theInfinity box to control usage, each crew

member has to log in to access the system.We are monitoring the usage, but untilnow they have been ‘no limit’. We arelooking at perhaps two hours’ time perday per crew member as a limitation, butuntil now we have not been forced to putanyone on the limitations.

The last third of our fleet, the latestimplemented at the end of last year is withKVH. We decided to go for their mini-VSAT dome, it’s not very big, so very easyto install and an easy set up.

With this system we actually put inrouters on each deck, this is on 14 vessels.We don’t support any communicationcomputers on board for the crew, for thecrew’s access to the internet they need tobring their own devices, most of themhave laptops but it could be tablets, orwhatever.

They can only connect to the internetthrough the routers and they have unlim-ited use.

So we tried three different systems, andnow we then have to monitor what we actu-ally prefer. On the VSAT installations wehave the FleetBroadband 500 as backup.

Digital Ship – So you’re currently goingthrough this process at the moment?

SK: Yes, because I think it’s very diffi-cult to say what the next step will be.

VSAT is very convenient for vesselstrading in Europe and the US. But as longas we have our MR size ships going to thePacific and Atlantic we have to look atother options, because they cannot go withVSAT, the crew will complain becausethey have no coverage. So trading in theseareas you are more or less forced to useInmarsat FleetBroadband.

That’s what we are looking at, andthat’s why we have taken one third of ourbusiness, trading mainly Europe/US, totry the VSAT out. I think it’s very conven-ient, and I actually personally prefer that

solution, because it’s very easy for thecrew, and it’s my perception that the crewlike the easy access with the hotspots.

I see it like an internet café for them,they just log on, Of course some mastersactually put up rules saying they can use itfrom eight o’clock in the evening to 10o’clock, or four to eight, which is wheneverybody wants to log on actually,because then the day team are off duty.

PF: What’s your fair use policy on theseKVH systems, for instance? How muchbandwidth do you have, or how muchcapacity? You said 10GB?

SK: On the VSAT we have no limit onusage, but on FBB our agreement is a VLAof 10GB.

AR: But can you do live streaming andSkype?

SK: Crew can go on Facebook andsome vessels also have Skype or MicrosoftMessenger/Lync for the master.

AR: We don’t support Skype and livestreaming.

Digital Ship – Do you think you will endup with one standardised system acrossthe fleet or split between different typesof vessels?

SK: I don’t think we’ll be standardised,because we have three different managers,and I like them to be able to explore andrecommend what to do.

Of course I try to standardise it if I seesome advantage in one system, and that’salso why we have two thirds withFleetBroadband, because as the first sys-tem we installed I think that was verygood and we copied that. But I also thinkthat changing to the VSAT was a gooddecision, because I can hear from the crewthat they like the access through therouters, and they can just log on even ontheir iPhone or Samsung, or whateverdevice they are using.

The other advantage here is that it’s

‘When I asked for a global Ku-band service five years ago everybody was laughing, but today it’s there, and it’s getting more and more worldwide’

– Peter Faurhøj, Maersk Supply Service

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separate, this is pure crew. We have thebusiness communications using the samebox from KVH, but it’s separate. The mas-ter has no administration for the crew,they just have to log on. This is pure crewwelfare, that part of it. So that’s what I likewith it, it’s easy to administer and wedon’t set up the rules.

The downside is that we have some ofthe complaints like there is no bandwidthafter working hours when several usersare using the available bandwidth.

Digital Ship – Is this an inevitable conse-quence of crews working in the sameenvironment where they live, these ‘bot-tlenecks’ as users compete for bandwidthat the same time?

PS: Even if you get one gigabyte youwill have that complaint. We are seeingthat. If you don’t have that traffic control,any system will fail.

You can see that at home where youhave 10 gigabytes and you have three boysplaying their Minecraft – you can imagine15 or 20 people on board a vessel. Youneed to do some control to give them a fairexperience.

SK: I don’t think that this is the normyet, because I think when looking towardsAsia, looking at some of our previous poolpartners, it was not my impression thatthis was the standard.

So I think there’s a way to go, but Istrongly believe that when shipping com-panies see the benefit on the commercialside, and a return of investment on thebusiness side – on the communicationcost, on all the files sent forward and backbetween masters and charterers – it wouldactually have savings in the long run.

I know that we should not pressure themaster and chief engineer in the officewith every e-mail, but on the other side Ithink it’s very convenient for the master orthe chief engineer if he can see the supersare online and he can just ping him onLync and then ask a question.

Setting up that dialogue every day withthe supers, they know how the vessel isactually run much closer than if they haveto pick up the satellite phone. Because inthe old days it cost 50 kroner a minute, soyou would not do it.

Now you just have one line messages,

like I do even with the guys sitting next tome in the office, I might send a one linemessage or a joke, and we can now doexactly the same with the vessel. So that’simproving teamwork, that’s one of thebiggest advantages.

Digital Ship – If it gets to a stage wherethese sorts of things create competitiveadvantages for shipping companies, doyou think this will drive people whodon’t want to be left behind a competitorusing information better?

SK: It’s very convenient to have onlineaccess to the vessel, we have the ability tocommunicate, with pictures (live and still)as well, with the onboard crew, becausemany of the challenges they have are technical. They’re very easy to solve whenyou can assist them with direct communi-cation rather than doing everything on ane-mail.

Digital Ship – And you think the value isoutstripping the cost?

SK: Yes.

Digital Ship – A number of high through-put satellite systems and next generationsatellites are about to be launched, withregional and global coverage – there’sGlobal Xpress, Telenor’s Thor 7, Jamesand Intelsat’s EpicNG, and O3b to namebut a few. Does the industry at largeneed, or even want, these services at thisstage, or is this very much a blue skyfuture that we’re looking at?

JC: I think we probably need to seg-ment the market a little bit across the dif-ferent constituent groups to see whatthey’re looking for.

Certainly we have a group of userstoday who are looking for out-and-outperformance. These are typically the off-shore guys and the cruise guys, and theyjust can’t get enough bandwidth in thelocations in which they operate.

So one of the reasons we’re coming for-ward with High Throughput Satellitesolutions is to address this marketplace.It’s one that is somewhat predictable interms of the locations in which the usersoperate, because people tend to be exploit-ing oil and gas reserves in the same loca-tions, whether it’s North Sea, offshoreBrazil, Gulf of Mexico.

But when we look outside of cruise andoffshore and into the wider maritime mar-ket, the discussion thus far has been thatuptake has been hindered by satcom costperformance, and that most people woulduse systems more if the cost per bit waslower.

High Throughput Satellite is a sure wayof driving down the unit cost of service,because we can deploy substantial spec-trum resources in a very narrow area andcan reuse that spectrum to provide morebandwidth for a given region.

If we can offer more bandwidth for thesame spectrum, that means someone,somewhere along the chain can drive alower price per bit to the end user, and wesee that lower price per bit reallycatalysing the market and driving fitmentand use to the next level.

So people who have been sitting on thefence in terms of taking on VSAT-typesolutions will say the economics of thesesolutions are now fit for their require-ments. They will get the bandwidth theywant for their crew and for their opera-tions at economics that make great sense.

That’s one of the reasons why we’recoming forward with High ThroughputSatellite solutions, because we really thinkit will take the market to the next level.

Digital Ship – So you’re saying that thereis demand from specific customersalready, but once that resource is avail-able you think it will be attractive to awider market segment?

JC: Absolutely.

Digital Ship – The coverage areas thatyou have planned for EpicNG at thebeginning, where are they and why havethose areas been chosen?

JC: Maritime is a big part of the strate-gy, as is aviation. We are presentlyfocused on two satellites that give cover-age of the Americas, across the Atlantic,and then all of Europe, the Middle Eastand across to Asia.

That’s the capability we haveannounced to date, but we fly 50+ satel-lites, and when you’ve got that manysatellites you’re continuously in replenish-ment mode. Last year we launched fivesatellites just to keep the fleet topped up.

So we will continue to look at ourreplacements and determine whether forthat orbital location we should fly anEpicNG payload. This means that thePacific, the Indian Ocean, more Atlanticcoverage are all possible in the comingyears for EpicNG coverage.

Our philosophy is somewhat differentto other operators in that we don’t see theneed to put High Throughput Satellite overareas where few aircraft fly or few shipstravel, because we already have wide beamKu-band coverage in that region.

The people who integrate our services(MTN, KVH, Harris CapRock, AstriumServices, etc) will bring together the widebeam capability alongside the HighThroughput Satellite capability, and theywill define a level of service across allthose different beams.

For example, as you cross the Pacific,the traffic density is not high, so we don’tfeel you need High Throughput Satellitein that region, as you can get very highperformance using the Ku- beams that are

there today. But as the vessel gets into theSouth China Sea or the Straits of Malacca,regions where there are very high densi-ties of shipping, everyone wants to main-tain their broadband experience and as asatellite operator your resources can getdepleted very quickly.

Those are exactly the areas where wewill deploy our EpicNG High Throughputcapability to make sure that we can deliverthe highest level of reliable service, and thatwe don’t get congestion on the network.

Digital Ship – Let’s come back to the ves-sel operators here, the potential cus-tomers for this – what’s your view? Doyou just see this as more of the same, ordo you think there’s potential for thistechnology to make a big difference?

SK: I think in the long run there is prob-ably potential, but presently from our sideit’s more or less just crew related, they arescreaming if they don’t get the bandwidththat they are promised. But in 10 yearsahead of course we’ll need this, because Ibelieve on a vessel as well as ashore youshould just be able to log on and then have10 gigabytes for your own laptop.

So in the long run I think the service isneeded, but I still think there is a long wayto go until all the ship owners actually wantto have this. It’s probably something for thecruise liners, because there everybody isexpecting that they can be online, becausethat’s leisure, but on the vessel you alwayshave to quantify it against the cost.

For vessel performance you more orless need e-mail and you need to be able tocommunicate with them on Lync or some-thing like that. Do you actually need morespeed than we actually can have today? Ifwe get what we are promised today then Ithink the next step will be to get used tothat and see what is the advantage, howcan we utilise it.

But in the long run I think we shouldactually be able to be just online 24/7 withhigh speeds so we can always talk to peo-ple, we can remote access everything. Ithink that’s the way the development isgoing, but it’s probably not going as fastas the industry wants or even that some ofus want, because we also have to look atthe expenses.

Digital Ship – And our other ship opera-tors? Peter?

PF: I think previously one of the bigproblems has been the low focus from thesatellite operators towards the maritimeindustry, because if maritime doesn’twant to pay the price for the bandwidththey can find someone else.

When they had the Olympics in China Icouldn’t buy any bandwidth for my ves-sels, and there was no focus, or very littlefocus, from the satellite operators towardsthe maritime industry. Now they have alot of bandwidth, and now they have tolook for new ‘victims’ to buy their service.

For instance, trains or aeronauticalhave a lot more focus, so that has been adisadvantage for the VSAT industry in themaritime business. It’s nice that it’s turn-ing now.

When I asked for a global Ku-bandservice five years ago everybody waslaughing, but today it’s there, and it’s get-ting more and more worldwide. You havealmost 100 per cent coverage and you see

James Collett, Intelsat, and Wei Li, Euroconsult

p1-31:p1-14.qxd 17/05/2013 10:02 Page 20

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Digital Ship June/July 2013 page 22

new ocean regions added to the systemsalmost daily.

Even if it’s the aeronautical part that isdriving the way the satellite operatorswork and we can have some of the crumbsin the maritime business, I think that’svery positive.

A lot of new services are coming up. Ka-band, for instance, I know there are a lot ofKa- systems running today and I am verykeen to try this and see how it works withthe rain fade and everything, but the oper-ators still have their focus in other places –it’s still the maritime industry so we justhave to wait until the trains and the planeshave got their share of the package.

But let’s see how it goes. The new serv-ices, I think they’re interesting, and whowould have thought that VSAT would bepart of the game today? Three years ago,when Inmarsat announced their GX serv-ice, everybody said ‘well this will be thedeath of (Ku-band) VSAT’ – but it’s stillthere, and it’s still alive and kicking.

It’s going to be interesting to see whatthe next few years will bring, and whenInmarsat’s Ka-band is in operation how itwill work. The O3b network is very inter-esting as well, and I think that the cruiseindustry is going to be the new driver forthe services we will see in our part of thebusiness.

SK: With VSAT, one of the most impor-tant things for me is that I know the costupfront, so it’s a fixed cost. If I can getunlimited use for a fixed cost that’s moreimportant than having even higher speed.

AR: That’s also why we are changing tothis package with a flat rate each month,because we have seen an extreme increasein costs on the E&E services lately, notonly due to the price hike last year but alsodue to increased traffic.

So it’s moving towards that, and also,as Soren says, if we as a ship owner have afixed cost and we know our budget wayahead, there will be no surprises. Well,there will be some but not many as wehave seen in the price hikes last year, andthat’s a clear advantage.

Going forward, of course the demandfor speed will increase, not only for thecrew welfare but also from the businessneeds. Soren also mentioned the charterparties and the contracts, that’s a lot ofe-mail attachments flying back and forth,and the size of the attachments is alsoincreasing significantly. So the traffic will

increase for sure.VSAT, from our point of view is also the

future, that speed and connectivity, withthings like Lync or Skype and similar serv-ices, that will be the standard in the future.

The fleet manager, superintendent orwhatever will have these to talk with thecrew on board, the crew on board one ves-sel will have these to talk with anothercrew because some chief engineers mightwant to share experiences on some prob-lem existing on sister vessels, or whatever.I see we will have more and more commu-nication like that in the future.

Digital Ship – Was the Ka-band elementimportant for you at TORM in makingyour decision on Xpress Link, with thepromise that you would be offered extrabandwidth in the future?

AR: What was important for TORMwas that it was a future-proof solution, sowe would not limit ourselves with equip-ment limited for this use only, that theprovider actually has a plan for the future,a plan for upgrades and more speed, andso on and so forth.

Digital Ship – But you could, alternative-ly, buy the Sea Tel antenna, for instance,and use another Ku-band providerbefore moving on to Ka-band in thefuture.

AR: Yes true, but we have deliberatelymoved away from buying equipment andnow we are leasing equipment. That’s alsoin order to know our costs, and to put theburden on the supplier, roughly speaking.They will have to deliver this SLA, and itwill be in their interests to repair theequipment on board.

SK: I am exactly the same, I prefer tolease and not to buy the equipment.

AR: That is a deliberate choice from our side.

Digital Ship – It seems that ‘certainty’ isplaying a big part in your choices – thecertainty in the SLA, the certainty in themaintenance of equipment belonging tosomeone else, and the certainty of thefixed monthly costs. If you have thesethen it’s easier for your planning strategy.

SK: Yes, and then also you get theadvantage, with leasing, that in threeyears’ time we can change everything andprobably keep the same costs, moving toanother supplier if my present supplier

cannot provide what I want.It’s only three years, even though that is

a little high, but I think they suggested fiveyears or something for the equipment. Wedecided on three years because we cantake a new decision then.

Digital Ship – Pelle, you’re heavilyinvolved in satcom buying decisions aswell – what’s your view on the differentoptions available in the market?

PS: Following on from the commentabout higher capacity and speed, I still seea huge problem and that’s the global cov-erage. We have now more than 300 con-tainer vessels on VSAT, and they don’thave true global coverage.

A bunch of them will probably havefull coverage, and looking at supply ves-sels they will be on the spot and they willhave true coverage. But in general, forcontainer vessels and tanker vessels, theywill not have 100 per cent coverage –meaning you need a back-up system,meaning when you increase your capacityand speed on your primary system youwill require the same on the back-up sys-tem. You cannot live with having oneprime system running 100 times fasterthan the back-up system.

So right now you are locked toInmarsat FleetBroadband as a back-up,and I think everybody knows howInmarsat would like to priceFleetBroadband as a back-up if a competi-tor is taking the prime system.

I think that’s a major risk for this highspeed, high capacity satellite system, thatit cannot deliver 100 per cent (uptime),and you then need to rely on a supplierwith a completely different strategy.

There is exactly the same problem withGX, you don’t get any guarantee of the Ka-band, meaning you can actually end upbuying an expensive system, a GX system,but you are running 50 per cent onFleetBroadband.

Digital Ship – Allan has mentioned thathis 99.5 per cent SLA on his XpressLinksystem will carry over to GX – does thatmean it will work either onFleetBroadband or on Ka-band 99.5 percent of the time?

AR: Yes, that’s the combined solution,but even if running 100 per cent of thetime on the FleetBroadband, it will be thesame price. Of course, then the speed

might not be the same, I agree, and thatwill be a concern in parts of the worldwhere Ku- coverage is not adequate.

However, it will be a limited period oftime until the Ka-band kicks in, and therewill be more coverage, at least that’s whatthey’re telling me.

Digital Ship – So you would need to setup your business systems to be able towork on the lowest bandwidth, you can’thave anything critical that needs to run atthe higher speed?

AR: True, or some other things will justtake a long time to come through on thelower speed. But it is feasible as of today,because we are not running Lync or Skypeor any bandwidth consuming applica-tions, even though the crew would like to.We have limited the access to these sys-tems through the firewall.

SK: Like Allan said, we, on our VSATinstallations, also only have theFleetBroadband as backup, and we haveinformed the crew that if suddenly one ofthese vessels are passing down to SouthAmerica they will have an area where theyhave no internet connection for the crew,then there will only be business connec-tion on FleetBroadband.

I think commercial operations actuallyonly really requires the e-mail, and then ofcourse it’s a matter of cost, because all theattachments, like we mentioned, are veryhuge. The other things are adding up moreon the technical side, how we do the tech-nical management. There we now need tofind how we can utilise the bandwidth.

Like in the office as well, when I amworking with the United States orSingapore offices, sometimes I go into ameeting room and I turn on Skype orLync, and have a meeting with them. It’sjust convenient that I can have exactly thesame, or our technical manager can haveexactly the same, with the vessel whenthey have a technical challenge on board.

So of course when they have the band-width we can use it, and I just see thatadvantage more with VSAT than I see itwith FleetBroadband.

Digital Ship – Wei, what are your predic-tions for the market when all of thesenew high throughput systems becomeavailable?

WL: First of all, as all of you mentioned,there is an increasing need for broadband

‘What was important for TORM was thatwe had a future-proof system’

– Allan Rasmussen, TORM

Certainty and consistency in the bandwidth level that could be achieved were identified as key to the effectiveness of any satcom system

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because bandwidth for almost everyapplication is growing, along with thenumber of installations.

If you look at the Ku-band, when it firststarted Ku-band systems were introducedfor home television broadcasting. If welook at the capacity usage as of today, atEuroconsult we calculated that on com-mercially available satellites in 2012,approximately 6,500 to 7,000 transponderssent and received signals. Mainly C- andKu-band.

How many of them are useful for mar-itime? We calculated between 150 to a maxof 200 transponders, so that maritime as oftoday stands for about 3 per cent (max 5per cent) of the FSS operators’ capacity,meaning traditional FSS operators likeIntelsat, Eutelsat, not Inmarsat. It’s a smallportion of their business.

If you go back maybe five or 10 years, ifwe are talking maritime communicationthe only solution was Inmarsat. But I thinkin the last few years, with the decrease inprice, the decrease in weight and the sizeof antennas that are installed, VSAT hasbecome more and more interesting.

They have capacity which is coveringmainly land for telecoms or for broadcast-ing, but still have some margins on thebeam which cover the maritime regions, sothey can use them to serve some vessels.

The FSS operators began with that and,receiving a positive response for VSAT,they began to enlarge the beams and covermore maritime regions to include morecustomers. Now that maritime is becom-ing a serious project, operators have start-ed to launch payloads to cover more mar-itime regions.

But even then the mobility side, includ-ing the maritime side, is still a small por-tion of the FSS operators’ game. Theyaren’t announcing the launch of a newconstellation which will cover only mar-itime regions. So there will always beareas without any Ku-band coverage.

Even with the Ku-band coverage thereis rain fade, and regulatory and safetyissues, so L-band will still exist. L-bandwill still exist for the very long termbecause of this reliability backup, for reg-ulatory and safety reasons. I can say thatin five or even 10 years, most vessels thatcurrently use Ku-band will also have L-band on board.

Inmarsat is investing in Global Xpress,and discussing Global Xpress at all theconferences, but don’t always mentionanother project in the works calledInmarsat-6, the L-band replacement satel-lites to replace the current Inmarsat-4 con-stellation. They are launching Alphasatsoon which will significantly increase theL-band capacity over Europe and theMiddle East.

So L-band will continue to exist for quitesome time, because the need is there, but itcould be for different purposes than today.It is the backbone of communication formany vessels today. Perhaps in five years itwill mainly serve as a backup for safetycommunications, but it will still exist.

The majority of customers who current-ly use VSAT previously relied onInmarsat, so as they switch over to Ku-band resources from L-band can be freed,and I believe that Inmarsat will find a wayto use this capacity. If they don’t, they willlose the spectral rights from the ITU and it

will go to other applications.So Inmarsat will try and prevent this

from happening, but they won’t be able toincrease their installation base that fast. Sohow can they use this spectrum? They canincrease the quality of the service.

On the other side, the bandwidth isgrowing because of the introduction ofKu-band and Ka-band. But for the L-band,bandwidth quality will grow as well,though not to the extent of Ku-, becausethere is this physical limitation. So Ibelieve there will still be a place for L-band in Global Xpress and Epic’s future.

Ku-band and Ka-band, in terms of busi-ness model for traditional FSS operators, isdifferent from Inmarsat. Inmarsat look athow many subscribers they have payingmonthly fees. But FSS providers are notconcerned with that, they place a satellitein the sky and prior to the launch theyhave to sell as much capacity as possible.

They assign multiyear contracts to serv-ice providers for capacity, who pay sever-al hundred million dollars per year, andare not concerned whether or not they usethe capacity or how or how much is used.So once the capacity is sold the risk istransferred to the service provider.

It’s different from the traditionalInmarsat case, because Inmarsat does notpre-sell L-band (except for leasing, whichis a small part of its business). It will beslightly different with Global Xpress,because the Ka-band is pretty much closerto FSS than the traditional MSS. But herethe business model is different, so the riskis different.

Inmarsat has to increase subscribersand has to increase ARPU because that isdirectly linked to their revenue. But theFSS operators, they do not really care howmany vessels there are, if they have threetransponders sold, they’re sold.

The risk is for the service providers whohave 10 vessels today, whether they canhave 50 vessels tomorrow or whether thesevessels will require three times the band-width tomorrow. So it’s quite different.

I think in the future for sure morebandwidth will be required, so theremust be a place for Ku- and Ka-. But L-band will still exist.

Part of this depends on the business

model, it’s not really 100 per cent technol-ogy driven. There are pricing issues anddistribution channels behind the products,so I think, from our perspective, thatInmarsat will still be active in the marketfor the very long term, and will still be thelargest provider.

But the market share of Inmarsat willdecrease, because there is more and morecompetition, people can provide highercapability services, and they are targetingmaybe different targets, not just maritime.

Everyone has their own place I believe,for example O3b has a very high capabilityservice, but the antenna is quite complexand quite big, so you cannot install it on asmall fishing vessel for instance. Everybodyis targeting a different audience.

It really depends on your strategy. Ifyour strategy is aimed at targeting everysingle opportunity, I think in that casemaybe you will not profit. Look at your

strengths, look at your weaknesses, thencompare them to others. Position yourselfproperly and find a good distributionchannel.

Digital Ship – Chris, your company isproviding antennas for all of these, Ka-band, Ku- and C-band, L-band – what’sthe Cobham strategy on all of this?

CI: As well as MSS, we have workedwith FSS providers such as Intelsat, goingback many decades, and also we have amajor investment at the moment inInmarsat GX. We’re supplying Ku-band,C-band, Ka-band, X-band systems, this isin addition to our very wide and broadinstalled base on L-band.

We wouldn’t say you needed to gowith one area in a particular band oranother, it’s a question of looking at therequirements for each sector. Certainly wewouldn’t say you need a particular tech-nology, such as Ka-band, we would haveto listen to our customers very carefullyand find out what they need at the solu-tion level, and also judge where therequirements are going to be several yearshence. But we would not prescribe a cer-tain flavour of band or technology neces-sarily for our customers.

What we can say is that the require-ment for bandwidth is charging ahead at

an unprecedented rate, so in terms of therequirement we see, certainly on theInmarsat side, they have reported verystrong take up in their largest SCAPs.

I think all of the big SCAP models, theone to two gigabyte SCAPs, the three tosix gigabyte SCAPs, and the 10 gigabyte ornow ‘all you can eat’ SCAPs, they’vereported a doubling of uptake in those forthe last year vis-a-vis the previous year.

Comsys has been telling the marketabout the maritime VSAT, and where justa year or two ago we were talking a fewgigabytes per month quite commonly,these have advanced now to 10 or 20 giga-bytes per month.

On a purely VSAT platform, not anadapted L-band platform with throttlingor anything like that, we’re talking nowabout common stories of 50, 60 or moregigabytes per month per vessel. So,absolutely certainly, elements of the mar-ket such as the tanker sector, and some ofthe more complex high end commercialvessels, are showing a strong requirementfor greater bandwidth.

We have a project, a contract for morethan $40 million with Inmarsat for GX,and we are providing two Cobham termi-nal size platforms for that system. It’sgoing to be interesting to see how thatchanges the market, because in terms ofwhat it delivers much of it is new.

The Ka-band characteristics are differ-ent, the pointing accuracy is an order ofmagnitude greater than what is deliveredon L-band. We’re talking about less than0.2 degrees of pointing accuracy, which isa quantum leap compared to the accuracyrequired for L-band, and yet there will bean expectation in the market for us todeliver, certainly with the smaller sizeplatforms, something which is nearer incost to what people are currently used tofor an L-band high end terminal.

I won’t say anything about price guar-antees at the moment for hardware, butofferings will be available nearer that endof the spectrum in terms of hardware cost.

GX is the first Ka-band system whichwill be pretty much a global service, andalso what is interesting about it is they willbe delivering an end-to-end system. Interms of what they have announcedrecently on their network, we’re notinvolved in this as a hardware provider,but looking at what the characteristics are– it’s interesting.

Alongside the VARs, Inmarsat are pro-viding the solution level as well as the satel-lite infrastructure level, as well as manag-ing the hardware platform. Through theformer Ship Equip they also have this serv-ice delivery platform. So they are providingan end-to-end system, and this is changingthe market significantly.

At the same time we have unprecedent-ed levels of competition coming in, whichis a very good thing.

We mentioned O3b, it’s a far more of aspecialist platform, and it would be wrongto position that really for the wider com-mercial market. We hear you need to com-mit to a whole beam from O3b, and thiswill be very much of interest to passengerand some of the specialist areas such asscientific research vessels etc.

But as other platforms advance we will see very good, well-needed NorthAtlantic capacity which will be delivered

Allan Rasmussen, TORM, Wei Li, Eurocosult, and Pelle Stroby, A. P. Møller – Maersk, watch a VSAT antenna being put through its paces

at the Cobham SATCOM testing facility

p1-31:p1-14.qxd 17/05/2013 10:24 Page 24

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SATCOMS

Digital Ship June/July 2013 page 26

by THOR 7, and as EpicNG is rolled outthen we will continue to work with themas we have done in the past on the previ-ous platforms.

What I think will be the decider is ifuser simplicity can be maintained, and,coming back to my first point, is it whatthe customer needs? If everything that wehave described is too complex and theattempt to provide an end-to-end systemmeans that there is just too much in termsof the value chain to deliver from onecompany, then that will be a big challenge.

It will certainly be successful and itwill change the market if, from the enduser perspective, it is functional and it isnot overly complex. I think we will seemore in the next couple of years, that willbe the testing time to see if that can trulybe delivered, something accessible andfunctional.

SK: That is what is needed, becausetoday if I want to buy a cell phone I canprobably log on to the internet in themorning, then after a couple of hours Ihave an idea of what I want, I can go downto a retail shop, I can look atthree/four/10 different things, and at theend of the day I can decide what I want,because there is not a big difference on thenewest technologies.

But I think the difficult part in thisindustry, with satellite coverage to thevessels is there are so many choices. I amnot an expert in it so I need expert advice,but a lot of experts tell us different things,so I actually have to base my decision in this on what I believe. This is not what I want.

I want to have, like on the cell phone, Iwant to have very good advice on whatthe next step is. But there are so many dif-ferent choices, and I don’t know what thefuture will be. It’s not easy.

So actually what I need from the mar-ket is, like on the cell phone, I need tomake the best bet on my first choice. Ithink that’s actually the challenge in this.

Digital Ship – High throughput satelliteswill, of course, only provide a tool, a wayto use applications to run your businessand offer services to crew. What kind ofapplications do you see coming with thenext generation if we have cheaper andfaster bandwidth?

AR: We can take our support further, if we have some issue on board our ves-sels. There could be engine trouble, orthere could be anything else – why nottake a webcam or a videocam wirelesslyaround the vessel and show some expertsitting back in the office what is actuallythe issue?

Why is this broken down, what can Ido, how can I repair it? Something likethat could be the future.

CI: That’s what we did at the launch ofFleetBroadband as a showcase. We hadthat model. But at the time we didn’t havethe pricing structure for widespread use ofstreaming services.

PF: We have done it a couple of times.It works okay, it doesn’t add that much toit to have video, because a picture in goodquality is far better than a blurry webcampicture. So if you have a good picture wecan see everything on that one.

PS: On all our American vessels forMaersk Line Ltd we are running all the

CCTV over FleetBroadband, compressedwith a tool. So it is possible. Of course youhave some limitations with a monthly capor something else, so you need to make achoice and not do everything. But I don’tthink we are having so many restrictionsas we want to claim we have.

It’s possible, but you need to prioritisewhat do you want to put through. Again,you can get as much bandwidth as youwant, but if you don’t have a way of con-trolling your usage you will just use thebandwidth.

Digital Ship – In terms of applications,are there applications that you see thatwould need a high speed connectiontransferring huge amounts of data, or areall those applications going to beonshore and communicating with theship?

PS: On our container vessels where wehave been running tests last month, justdownloading log files from an IT perspec-tive, we have done tests on the VSATwhere it takes more than 20 minutes todownload a log file – that’s not acceptable.Today you can do that on FleetBroadbandin less than 10 minutes.

So of course there is a requirement forspeed and high bandwidth, not for futuretechnologies, this is the requirementtoday. On most tankers we are doing fiveto seven gigabytes per month just for busi-ness communication, just running theapplications on the vessel. Or even morethan that, this is an average.

Digital Ship – Is it an issue that theseapplications won’t run at lower speeds,or it’s just a matter of inconvenience ifyou have to wait longer?

PS: Many of these systems are very sen-sitive to variations in speed, so you willhave ‘time out’ as a problem. If the systemis designed for a normal land applicationwhere you have no limits in bandwidth assuch, you will still get these problems thatthe system will time out.

You also see problems when you have big variations within the downloadof a file, that the application actually shuts down.

Digital Ship – So would stability be abigger priority for you than the speed?Would you rather have a slower connec-tion that stayed within a certain rangethan something that burst up and down a lot?

PS: We have seen in this test that thestability that we assumed was good on theVSAT was not good enough. If it’s stablewe can design systems based on that.

SK: I think many of the applicationswill be run ashore and you will just needaccess to the data. You won’t even needthe crew involvement, you’ll just need tobe able to pull the data like you can dowith the present systems today. Of coursethe speed is still limiting the time it will take.

CI: We have a lot of focus at themoment in terms of connecting alldevices on the vessel. The Cobham policyat the moment is to connect up as muchas possible using lightweight Ethernet,and we have a development programmeat the moment which is focused aroundthat, balancing the L-band, and in the

future possibly the VSAT side, but alsoAIS radio and GMDSS consoles.

It certainly will be the position that in ayear or two it will be possible to have acontinuous stream of all key performanceparameters off the vessel, and that reallydoes match up with a lot of what peoplehave in other environments now, in termsof the Cloud.

I’ve got lots of Cloud-enabled devicesin my office or on my person. Nowadays Ihave an automatic update and backup ofall my files via the Cloud, I don’t have todo anything proactively. The application Ihave will use the amount of bandwidththat’s available and trickle feed, but makesure that over time everything that I havein my target area on my computer isbacked up.

We will certainly see more of that,that’s certainly Inmarsat’s plan, to movetowards a Cloud web service infrastruc-ture on GX. But we’ll see, I think, more ofwhat we see on land, mirroring of data-bases and replication. At the moment thisis only widely available to commercialships who have taken on aFleetBroadband unlimited plan.

PS: There is nothing that’s unlimited!Somebody tries to sell you somethingthat’s ‘all you can eat’ – but it doesn’t exist.

PF: All you can eat if you are not hungry!

CI: This will become easier, and solu-tions like engine monitoring. The engineoperators are now selling their services interms of availability, not in terms of hard-ware, and the monitoring has never beenreadily available.

It’s been talked about a lot over manyyears, but we will certainly at some stagereach the point when on land you canaccess the same rich volume of detail thatthe chief engineer can on the vessel.

PS: That’s the easy part, because if youare talking about engine monitoring that’sa system designed for maritime, meaningthey know about the limitation you havein bandwidth. But still you have a possi-bility of combining these two issues and

getting something.Where we really see the problem is HR

programs. Windows 7 – would you imag-ine how that would run over satellite?Having education programs where youcannot finalise them because beforeyou’ve answered the last question youget a timeout in the middle – if you havetried that three or four times then yougive up.

SK: Actually, as you mention educa-tion, now we have ECDIS, that will be arequirement next year. We are actuallyinstalling ECDIS this year on half of ourvessels and we will do the rest next year.

One of the biggest challenges is thateverybody has to be not only on a coursewhere they learn to use ECDIS, but alsowhere they have to use the ECDIS of themanufacturer you have, and in our fleetwe have different manufacturers, thoughnow we are streamlining the equipment toone supplier.

If you have a medical case or somethingand you have to relieve one of the crew itcould be that the replacement doesn’thave his updated manufacturer’s trainingon that specific manufacturer of yourequipment.

One of the new things that have beeninitiated is that now we can actually havethat course done on board. We have aVSAT connection, the only thing theyneed is a webcam since they have to seethat guy and they have to check the pic-ture of the face on his passport, and thenthey will issue the certificate after he hascompleted the test.

So this is something that actually willbe driving some of these requirements Ithink, because I can easily compare what-ever this will cost compared to the cost ofa vessel having to stay alongside becauseI have a medical case, and I cannot put anew mate or master on board just becausehe doesn’t have his ECDIS specific makercourse.

Now we can do it on board. Here youactually have a business need for it and abusiness case, because if this vessel is just

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SATCOMS

Digital Ship June/July 2013 page 28

staying one day longer that will easily be$10,000 you have lost in commercialincome with chartering.

Of course, if you do proper planningyou should never be in a case like this, allyour crews should have these courses along time before you are planning to havethem on board. But still there will be caseswhere this will not be the case, and if youjust have a few cases that would actuallyhave paid off the VSAT installation.

PS: We have several different kinds ofbusinesses, but for sure in the tanker andliner operation the business needs are get-ting higher and higher and stronger andstronger. So now there is a minimumrequirement for communication, and notjust for crew welfare where you can thencalculate what is the risk of having a ves-sel out of communication for some days,you will probably not lose people on that.

But if you are running business appli-cations then you also have a big risk if thesystem is not online. You can have a back-up, but if the backup is not a part of thefixed fee then you are running a risk onyour cost.

Digital Ship – So which option wouldyou prefer – to have 128 kbps all the time,running reliably at 99.99 per cent, orwould you rather have a system thatcould reach 1 Mbps but can fluctuatedown to 64 kbps?

PF: Well actually, when we started upwith VSAT in Maersk Supply Service wehad dedicated bandwidth, and when thevessel was moving from one area to anoth-er area we had the satellite guy travellingaround and setting up new modems, andthey worked a couple of months and theywent back again. It was a living nightmareto keep track of.

We had dedicated bandwidth, and fortwo of the vessels who were travellingaround the world, without telling them Ichanged to shared bandwidth, double thespeed but shared bandwidth, and theywere sharing this with 10 to 15 vessels.

The captain, who was very focused onhis VSAT, he called me and said, ‘This isthe best system I’ve ever worked with, it’sfast, it’s reliable’ etc. So I said ‘Before youhad 256/512 kbps dedicated, now we have512 kbps/1 Mbps shared’.

He said, ‘This is running double thespeed, it’s much more reliable and it’s aseamless changeover’.

That was the Speedcast platform wechose for those vessels, and actually theydidn’t realise they were not on dedicatedbandwidth anymore. So I think, while it’snice to have your dedicated bandwidth, Ithink the shared platform is just as good asthe dedicated.

AR: It’s funny you say that Peter,because we had the exact opposite experi-ence with shared bandwidth. Where it’sdedicated we had only positive feedbackfrom the vessel, and we have a lot of com-plaints from the vessels having sharedbandwidth.

Digital Ship – But is there an issue, com-ing back to what Pelle was saying, withapplications that don’t like variations inspeed? If you’re using business applica-tions where the bandwidth goes up anddown, might it affect performance?

PF: If the applications are made for

maritime business then they should bemade to handle it.

PS: But it is also different if you arebuying one gigabyte or you’re buying 64kbps or something like that. You are alsostressing the system if you are buyingsmall bandwidth and then it’s not stable.

PF: We have also supplied all our ves-sels with wireless access points for all thedecks, because if we didn’t do that theywould go out and buy all kinds of stuff.

They have three access points all overthe vessels. We can go, we can remote con-trol these systems, we have full access tothe vessel, we have full access to selectwhat they should be able to do and whatthey shouldn’t be able to do.

We had a vessel where we had to openup the service, and suddenly everythingwent down. We discovered that only onething dragged the system to zero, and thatwas the Apple services, App Store, iTunes,all that. It could actually drag our onboardVSAT system down.

So of course we have told them theycan access our system with their smart-phone, but you will not be able to updateyour programs, you will not be able to download music, you will not be ableto do this and that, because it’s a band-width killer.

CI: Facebook was the number one appin the recent Astrium survey of crew com-munications, and that is obviously a majorchange since 10 years ago – social mediajust did not exist. So this is a completelynew dimension for every element in theservice chain to consider, and it will beexpected in the future.

Digital Ship – As a final question – in 10years’ time, what would you see as beingthe most widely used communicationsystem in commercial deep sea?

SK: Well, we started out talking abouteverybody having 10 devices, and I thinkthat in ten years’ time we will have a situ-ation that will be more like what we havewith cell phones today.

It will be decided whether it’s 4G, 3G,GSM, whatever, I won’t care. It will justlog on automatically, the modem or deviceI have will find the connection automati-cally, and I can even change suppliers if Iwant.

Exactly like your cell phone, it will findwhatever is available where I am, and itwill choose the cheapest supplier where I

am, where I have a subscription, and itwill be up to the crew and myself whatbandwidth I would have.

Something like roaming satellites,where even my crew can log on to ahotspot on board and they can then buy it.If they want to have 10 Mbps like theyhave at home they can just swipe theircredit card and obtain the bandwidthrequired.

PF: I think that sounds nice, but withthe speed that we have seen the technolo-gy change for maritime applications ormaritime services it might be a little bitlonger in the future.

I believe low orbital satellites might bea little bit more widespread in the future.It could be for mobile devices for personaluse. But I am not sure that the maritimebusiness will be the driver for this service,it will probably be the news, or military –think of military applications like GPS inthe good old days.

I hope there will be some more options,today we have VSAT and we haveInmarsat services, of course Iridium aswell – that’s not much to choose from. Iwould like to see some more differentservices in the future, that would be nice.Different technologies.

SK: But from a supplier point of viewhow much will the airlines drive this aswell for us? Last time I was up flying I hadfree internet on the way to Singapore.

CI: The aero industry has an advantageover maritime, in that it’s not so badlyaffected by the rain fade issue on the Ka-band, for example. They don’t have thesame levels of attenuation higher up in theatmosphere. So yes, there will be a lot ofdevelopment on that side.

There have been new Ka- antennasannounced in the last few weeks whichare flat panel for use on aircraft, whichdoesn’t exist as yet on maritime. So aerowill be a driver, it will bring forward thenetworks and the solutions which mayflow into maritime - certainly.

But I think in 10 years’ time Ka-bandand high throughput satellites as a wholewill be leading in terms of bandwidth, butnot in terms of installations. In terms ofinstallations of the key voice and data ter-minal on a ship, we will still be in therealm of L-band and FB, and I will be veryhappy to see that, because I was there atconception 10 years ago.

JC: To Chris’s point I would agree that

in 10 years’ time, in terms of the number ofinstallations, that the L-band installationswill outnumber any other system. But Iwould say in terms of what this group ofusers is spending on services, I believe thespend on VSAT services will be greaterthan L-band in 10 years’ time.

PS: In total or per vessel?JC: Certainly per vessel, but I would

say the aggregate spend on VSAT serviceswill be higher than at L-band. I think thatcould probably be the case today.

PF: As a capacity provider James,what’s your view on the price trend for thebandwidth, where do you see the pricesgoing, up or down?

JC: The cost per bit is coming down. Thebandwidth has to grow and the unit pricehas to come down. We’re delivering morefrom the same spectrum, that’s what thenext generation of satellites is giving us.

We shouldn’t forget Iridium as well.Whilst Intelsat, Inmarsat and Telenor areall investing in High Throughput Satellitenetworks, I think that if you were to addup all those investments they’re still belowwhat Iridium are investing in their nextgeneration network.

So that will help Pelle in relation to hispoint about being held to ransom for back-up services. That particular monopoly isgoing to go away starting in 2015 whenIridium NEXT comes on-line.

So as new High Throughput Satellitecapability comes online, Iridium will becoming online with its own next genera-tion services. Another resilient L-bandbackup solution will be available, andthere will be choice in the market.

PS: We always have to wait anotherthree years!

SK: The KVH system we have, wedon’t use Iridium ourselves but they haveIridium on board that they use for theircontrol of the system. They installed it,they told me that was just for their backupif they had to connect.

JC: But just as the KVH Ku-band sys-tem should be upgradable to highthroughput capability, Iridium is alsomoving from OpenPort into the next gen-eration, and as I said, they’re spendingover $3 billion on that constellation.

CI: That’s part of my L-band predic-tion. What they’re talking about, band-width in excess of 1 megabit through anIridium NEXT terminal, that of course isvery interesting. We will see what servicesthey roll out alongside it.

PF: What speed do you think they willoffer on the next generation?

CI: I can only speculate, but Iridiumhave published L-band speeds of up to1.5Mbps. How much that is contended wewill see, and what the link performancereally is in practice: the design is for a low-latency service.

There are 66 further satellites which areplanned for NEXT – plus spares, and theyare very bullish about the implementationand scheduling.

Though there was that bet that wasmade in Washington recently, Globalstardid bet that it won’t be ready on time. TheCEO of Globalstar bet $1,000 to the CEO ofIridium that his network would not beready on time. The CEO of Iridium said,“Well I’ll take the bet – but perhaps youneed the money.”

We will see!

Cobham SATCOM was the host for the round table discussion session, welcomingparticipants to its Copenhagen offices, formerly the headquarters of Thrane & Thrane

DS

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