Technology has certainly advanced dramatically in any areas since 90-s but not that much in the area of offshore wireless communication which I was talked about tn the post about
Techwest Startrack system.
Imagine you are on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean,
perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles from land, and want to make a
phone call or access the Internet. Did you ever wonder how your wireless
device works when there are no cell towers or traditional
infrastructure available like at home? And more importantly why it does
not work better, faster or cheaper for voice and data applications?
The ability to communicate while at sea is incredibly complex and has
only been possible and reliable within the past ten years.
Unfortunately, the connectivity comes at a steep price because of the
high investment required by the cruise lines and satellite carriers who
must price access by the amount of bandwidth that is used. It turns out
that this is a highly inefficient and costly method to allow passengers
and crew to communicate, and the formula is about to change.
While the state-of-the-art has dramatically improved there are still
many technical obstacles to achieving the same level of
interconnectivity that we experience on land through wired or wireless
networks. Cruise ships are seeing dramatic increases in traveler demand
for communications services caused by the use of smartphones, laptops
and tablets as part of their vacation experience. The bottom line for
the consumer is that current cruise communications networks aren’t
designed to meet these voracious demands for mobile connectivity.
Consider the following statistics from MTN Communications, one of the
biggest sellers of telecom equipment to the cruise ship industry:
- Internet Logins – In the past five years, Internet
logins on the MTN network almost doubled from approximately 15 million
to 27 million per year;
- Voice Usage – Based on revenue data over the past five years, voice usage increased approximately 50 percent;
- VSAT Bandwidth
– In the past five years, bandwidth demand among MTN VSAT (high-speed)
customers increased six-fold from 75 Mbps to 475 Mbps per year
Limited bandwidth is still the main reason network speeds, quality of
service and data rates are better on land than at sea, coupled with the
failure to integrate other technologies that could optimize the
transport of large amounts of data by using different networks.
Virtually all of the fleet has WiFi
throughout their ships but it is painfully slow at times which is due to
the number of users and available bandwidth. There are also severe
limitations on the types of files that can be accessed in order to
protect the network and compensate for the bandwidth limitations.
Internet access costs between $.25 and $.75 per minute, depending on the
selected plan.
Cellular voice and data is available on all ships but is very costly,
up to about five dollars a minute through your local carrier, or up to
ten dollars a minute if you use Intelsat satellite links through the
ship’s voice network. Data connections through cellular can also be very
pricy unless you have a data plan. Verizon is the only American carrier
that offers a good deal for their customers that use tablets or smartphones on ships. They have a monthly cost of $25 for each 100 Mbytes.
While
AT&T has a similar plan it
doesn’t allow for data access at sea, which means you can pay around
$20 per megabyte. That translates to a high cost for using email and
sending pictures, to say nothing of downloading documents. If you try to
save money by using a VoIP service such as Skype to make and receive
calls you will have limited success because of the latency issues with
voice transmission through a satellite, whether you establish a WiFi or
cellular connection.
Every cruise ship has one or more satellite
dishes and complex antenna arrays to provide the primary communications
link to other ships and land for passengers and crew. MTN is the primary
provider of such facilities for almost thirty years.
When you are on a ship, all telephone, data, and video traffic is
carried through a complement of large satellite dishes found on the top
deck.
One global company based in Florida,
MTN has
for the past thirty years pioneered and developed satellite-based
services for virtually all of the cruise ships and cargo carriers in the
world. The
Maritime Telecommunications Network began offering services when the
Intelsat constellation
was launched in 1965. The introduction of these orbiting repeaters
changed the way the world communicated and four years later we watched
the result during the first lunar landing that was relayed through Intelsat.
There is no simple technical solution to improve the passenger
experience in connecting with the outside world while at sea.
Provisioning more bandwidth from the satellites is not the answer
without also considering land-based services and on-ship clouds for
caching of data. As reported by the
Wireless Broadband Alliance, smartphone sales have overtaken PC sales in 2012 and in the future will dwarf the amount of data used by laptops. This is also true for ship passengers and has caused the industry to respond.
Consumer demand, economics, and technological advancements have
driven MTN to launch its next-generation platform to serve the cruise
ship industry. It is called
NEXUS, and it will ultimately change the way we communicate to fellow passengers and to the rest of the world.
One deficiency in the way communications facilities are presently
configured is the lack of interoperability between onboard WiFi systems
and those on shore when the ship docks. That means that cruise lines
cannot take advantage of the newest technology to handoff high-volume
traffic and to cache large files. To solve this problem MTN is building a
seamless network to tie onboard and on-shore systems together as part
of a larger plan to enhance connectivity, regardless of where the
passengers wishes to talk, text, or transfer data.
MTN has
invested in the design and launch of special-purpose satellite payloads
that will ride on
the next generation Intelsat EPIC platform which will offer at-sea communications experience which is presently impossible to achieve.
There are three essential components to NEXUS: network, applications,
and storage. In simplified terms the system will be a hybrid network of
satellite and terrestrial facilities tied to a ship cloud to transfer
very large amounts of data and store it onboard. Client applications,
Internet café, cellular Mobile at Sea, TV, social media and other applications will all be merged and seamless for passengers.
This is accomplished by sophisticated control and manipulation of
satellite spot-beams, on-the-fly bandwidth allocation from the
satellites, and data compression. A large part of the equation is WiFi
for data transport which is why MTN is building an infrastructure to tie
WiFi on land to ships when they are within a few miles from shore. This
will allow them to optimize expensive bandwidth from Intelsat to route
all other traffic to land-based systems.
If you have wondered why connections are so slow it is because presently there are only a few
megabytes of bandwidth that must be shared among all passengers and facilities on any ship. In the future it will not be megabytes but
terabytes that will be available.
The next generation system will also offer a unique application called
Connect at Sea.
This will fill a needed gap in ship-to-shore communications and also
provide for friends and family to be able to communicate onboard without
high cost by giving direct dial capability between smartphones. Connect
at Sea will eliminate this problem and allow voice, text, and messaging
between smartphones, just like Skype and other applications can
accomplish on land. This is a WiFi-based service that can be used
onboard, in port, or anywhere there is a suitable WiFi connection. It
will go a long way to reduce the high cost of communications for
passengers on a global basis.
In the near future whether you are in the middle of the ocean or
docked at a foreign port, your personal communications device (whether
smartphone, Blackberry, laptop or tablet) will provide equivalent
communications that we have all come to expect at home. It will all be
possible because of sophisticated networks, powerful computing, low cost
bandwidth terrestrial integration, and seamless switching. No more
$5.00/minute phone calls and no delays in transmitting or receiving
emails or access to websites.
A short half-century ago when the first
Sputnik satellite was launched by the Soviet Union
it is fair to say that nobody could have foreseen the results today. Today, we expect and demand such services
whether we are on a mountain top or in the middle of an ocean.
From
Forbes.
