Can we make crew internet access work? Yes we can!

Reminding ourselves just how few seafarers have anything like real internet access is good means of self-flagellation and of remembering there are many people less fortunate than ourselves.

But I think it’s time to stop playing that tune. It’s a bit of a one-noter for one thing and the fact is that the barriers to crew calling lie in the hearts, minds and wallets of shipowners and managers rather than in the ability of IT departments, airtime providers or middleware vendors to provide it.

It may not be as easy as just sticking a phone or a PC in the mess and handing out scratch cards – though that has certainly been tried. And as Inmarsat’s Michiel Meijer pointed out at last week’s DigitalShp Athens conference, to be done right would almost certainly require moving to a managed services environment.

What’s that – an airtime provider advising you to spend more on airtime? Who would have thought it. But Meijer’s case was simple – a 2GB FleetBroadband plan would give enough capacity to get a crew connected.

The business case could be made by comparing the high cost of replacing crew – junior or senior and fed up with no access to communications – to the cost of the comms. Add travel and recruitment costs and it looked like a no-brainer.

He accepted the point that management needed to understand the business case – and Globecomm’s Gregor Ross pondered if we weren’t giving seafarers false hope about what the experience would be like. Not the same as ashore certainly, but better than nothing is surely the answer.

And he cited an anectodal example of a Dutch company that at one time contemplated taking email off the ships completely, only to do a 180 degree turn and install internet access across the fleet once they understood the practicalities.

The key he said, was in managing the risks on behalf of owners with dedicated software and solutions that provided a middle ware layer that kept control of costs and delivered genuine services.

Right on cue, up stepped Christian Vakarelis of Navarino with an Infinity box in one hand and bunch of case studies in the other. Focussing on a handful of examples from among the Greek shipping community, he demonstrated how managers could share the cost of the internet access with the crew to the satisfaction of both parties. Such satisfaction required a VLA plan of 10GB plan, a service due for replacement in January 2013 with FleetBroadband Unlimited, he noted.

The longer the voyage, the greater the usage for obvious reasons but owners are mixing and matching – selling PINs to crews that give them very low voice rates and budgeted data access.

Other owners provide a separate system for crew calling, providing Wi-Fi and 25MB PINS good for 5-6 hours of light surfing.

One owner used a combination of business and social applications – running remote monitoring and management reporting systems, filing compliance forms and receiving NTMs and were considering adding Skype to the crew portfolio.

Selling PINs to crew was enough to cover half the cost of a VLA plan which it was also using for purchasing and maintenance and VPN file sharing applications.

A final example was a company that provided a fixed system of 20 cards of 100MB each which were reloaded every week. The seafarers used them or lost them. Visitors and agents were issued 500MB cards but in order to make sure that crew got the required rest and didn’t stay up all night surfing, the cards were time-stamped to be only usable between 17:00 and midnight ship time.

Staying up all night surfing – not a sentence I thought I would be writing this month or any month quite frankly. And what was noticeable here was the huge difference in the amount of crew use to the business communications, the former way ahead of the latter.

It was the same at the GVF VSAT forum earlier this year – business comms form a small part of the data load and crew comms are the driver. It was thought that would make it hard for to make the case to management that such services were needed.

Asked by a member of the audience why Inmarsat did not provide scratchcards for data access in the same way as they did for voice, Meijer replied that the subject was under internal consideration.The evidence from DigitalShip Athens is that this service is selling itself.

Time perhaps for more owners and managers to stop pretending crew calling is expensive or difficult to implement and get with the programme.