When shipping and satellites collide
It’s a strange experience to be at a trade show and know perhaps 2% of the people rather than 60-70% but that is the experience at Satellite 2014, where the communications industry is continuing to mount a charm offensive on their maritime counterparts.
The first day of the show yesterday saw the Global VSAT Forum host a day of sessions including maritime-focussed panels looking at the maritime opportunity.
All the big beasts were in attendance and if the audience was sometimes rather less enthused than one might have expected the range was broad, from future regulation and safety services to the ‘super-segments’ of cruise and energy, through regional VSAT services and even a little shout for good old L-Band.
One thing is certain though, all the operators and their service partners see maritime as an untapped market that is ripe for more coverage and connectivity. This in itself is not news, but when Cobham’s Jens Ewerling said they were building 25,000sq m of manufacturing capacity for maritime terminals and antennas you get a sense of the complementary moves being made that will balance the investments in GX, EPIC-NG, Thor-7 et al.
Given that competition is so strong and that the land grab for customers and real estate is really only just getting going, there was polite deference to Inmarsat and the potential of GX to follow on from FleetBroadband for users that want to upgrade to VSAT over the next few years.
Telenor’s Lars Janols stressed that Thor-7 was not designed to compete with GX and that the ability to roam Ka-Ka and across bands is a long term wish, though not one he expects to see soon. Later same day, Intelsat’s James Collet pushed the line that EPIC would provide the fast focussed throughput in regions where it was needed, in addition to more measured global coverage.
Asked how much interoperability he thought was enough, iDirect’s Eric Watko came out in favour of platforms that enabled roaming rather than the ‘closed architecture’ of the GX Service Enablement Platform, but he said his company still wanted to work with Inmarsat if possible.
Whether this would also result in an ‘all-band’ antenna is less certain. Ewerling suggested that though possible, the real question was whether users would be prepared to pay three times what they are paying now for single-band units.
This outbreak of peace doesn’t mean there aren’t problems elsewhere COMSYS’ Simon Bull rounded on Iridium (confusingly on a VSAT panel despite being an L-Band operator) for its high latency despite being a LEO operator. Iridium’s Brian Pemberton said the company had installed additional gateways in Norway and Alaska to improve the service.
Pemberton had a surprising card to play though. Iridium NEXT, its planned next generation L-Band system is designed to host Ka antennas that the company could lease to another operator that wished to run a global Ka-band network. And so another plank in the Ka v Ku band argument gets knock away. Pemberton said Iridium’s links to VSAT providers for which his system is used as a backup might provide fruitful opportunities for collaboration.
O3B’s Ashok Rao got an even rougher ride, but he insisted that an eight month delay to service start was not a big deal and that banner cruise customer RCCL would be delighted with the service when it got up and running. He also said the operator would look for energy business and would be ready to launch its next satellites by June.
O3B might be the current whipping boy for the risks attached to innovative services, but Bull wondered if the real problem might not be that maritime satellite was suffering from a lack of innovation. Where were the innovative services, the Teledesics, [and ICOs and Connexion by Boeing] that promised so much.
Well, for the most part, we know the answer to that one, but the real question is where the industry might be in 20-30 years’ time – by which he meant satellite not shipping.
You would assume more speed but really the answer was more about flexibility, efficient use of spectrum, optimised signals and better managed connectivity, to get more from what can be delivered rather than simply promising more and more.
That might mean a different kind of upgrade – from infrastructure that was designed to support a PTT or LESO model and away fro processes to manage capacity that are somewhat behind where the industry is going in terms of quality and reliability of the signal.
But wouldn’t that mean a change in the risk profile of the industry asked Bull? Yes, nodded the satellite men, without obliging any further information for what that might mean for them or, indeed the user.