Strange days indeed…
It’s been an exciting seven days on MaritimeInsight, though it’s taken a while to get the words to the page.
To start with, we finally learned what’s eating Jim Dodez and it seems hell hath no fury like a DP scorned. If you are not a member of the many satellite-related LinkedIn Groups to which he contributes, Dodez was called out on his continually trashing Inmarsat by a man who suggested “maybe it’s just the nature of the maritime market. If so, it makes me glad I’m in aviation.”
Dodez said in response: “there’s history behind the relationship where we tried to work more closely with Inmarsat for many years before deciding to compete head to head against them. When we launched our service it was a product positioning strategy. Inmarsat had the monopoly on maritime satellite service for a long time, so we were just trying to break the monopoly mentality and get noticed. What set me over the top was when the Inmarsat chairman made some insulting remarks about us during their 2011 year end conference call.”
Well, I reckon they are about evens on name-calling and general insults by now but KVH has certainly ruffled Inmarsat’s feathers, of which more anon.
Stranger still was that in the days following I got a number of calls and emails from people generally expressing support for the point I was trying to make before the discussion really went postal – that VSAT vendors need to up their game with customers before they try to trash talk the competition, because the end-user experience on stitched together VSAT services can fall short of expectations compared to the dull, but very consistent service delivered by L-Band.
Earlier this week, I attended the Inmarsat Investor Day in London. Self-appointed neutrality watchdogs should note that to do this I bought one Inmarsat share at a cost of 594p. Sadly the commission was £12.50 and my share is now trading a touch under what I paid for it, but with a forecast price of 610p, I’ll hold it for now.
There will be a fuller post on the Inmarsat Maritime presentation in due course but among the highlights for me were the idea that Inmarsat will launch its own version of iTunes before the new satellites are up and encourage developers to put their apps on the platform to be accessed over GX.
A tweet about this raised a reply from John Finney of 03B to the effect of “what was so special about that”. Leaving aside the novelty of the proposition (and someone please correct me if I’m wrong), I think it could be seen as either a threat or an opportunity for the software suppliers and application developers who have supported Inmarsat since 1979.
Not two weeks earlier and sitting in another meeting room, a leading airtime and value added applications provider told me that they could see the market moving somewhat this way, with an increasing number of new application providers emerging and bundling airtime with their products to take this business away from the larger ISPs and smaller DPs.
The future, he said was in providing the value adds that customers could use to enhance the bandwidth, which even as it becomes more commoditised, increases in throughput, in turn making bigger, more complex apps possible.
Seems like Inmarsat has the same idea, unveiling its agreement with CISCO to build a service enablement platform to deliver value added services. A developer day to be held at Inmarsat in the very near future will hopefully shed more light on this.
In the meantime and on a slightly lighter note my friends at gCaptain have noticed a very James Bond 007 solution to lack of connectivity at sea – lasers. Virginia-based company Laser Light has announced a commercial satellite communications constellation, which could be operational by 2017 promising terabytes and gigabytes per second of throughput.
Maritime isn’t specifically mentioned but with the current goldrush to find the next ‘game-changer’ well underway, perhaps this could be an option. And if the plan’s backers can’t get the technology to work they could always buy Iridium and fund the launch of NEXT instead.