Old words for old (and new) problems

It’s good to see a modern maritime journal digging out the language of (almost) another age to describe the current one. This works fine except when the sub-editors are younger than you and therefore baffled by your use of antique terms.

When Safety at Sea described owners as ‘hidebound’ for not investing in more technology onboard ship it was enough to make me reach for my Webster’s, fill a pipe or two and settle by a roaring fire.

What SASI meant – though the point was that of Inmarsat Maritime president Frank Coles – was that owners are hindering the greater use of high technology applications onboard ship through reluctance to put their hands in their pockets.

Noting that the shipping industry is ‘a fairly conservative place’ is not exactly news though Coles is closer to the point when he says that there is a dearth (there we go again) of talent working for shipowners who ‘grew up in the IT explosion’.

Shipowners he continued were ‘not ready to embrace IT and few shipowning companies ‘have extensive IT environments’. Again only partially true. The clients I work for are as connected as they come – on the landside at least. And when I asked one recently if he could ask the master of a ship something for me, he replied back advising that I could ask the master myself, copying him in. A response was back within hours.

I suspect that the reason why shipping companies have resisted IT onboard ship is partly generational. This is not just that the people that run ships distrust computers as flaky inventions of long haired college drop-outs, but that some owners think these same people should concentrate on running the ship rather than fiddling with computers.

Such computerphobia is far from unique but there are practical reasons too – ships are also places of heavy industry, where chunky bits of equipment hold sway and anything fragile or temperamental could be a risk rather than a benefit.

The other issue is of course, cost. Satcoms equipment – above and below decks – is expensive but then so is launching satellite constellations and providing a service that aims a beam at a target that is moving in multiple directions.

But given that you buy your satcoms with your newbuilding and that you might expect to upgrade perhaps twice in the life of the vessel, the cost is hardly prohibitive. It is more accurate to say that owners think satellite communications are expensive in practice, whereas in fact the price has fallen for a decade and continues to fall.

Coles points out that a service that costs ‘less than 1% of daily running costs’ is hardly prohibitive. Unfortunately for service providers and not just Inmarsat, the recession in shipping provides a perfect excuse for owners to delay investment in new systems and services because they are being massacred by bunker costs and unable to prise better freight rates out of charterers.

The recent ending by Inmarsat of volume discounts and the price rise on pay-as-you-go FleetBroadband may not help his case with his sternest critics, but the central point is true enough – there is no excuse these days for poor ship-shore-ship communications.

The tide is certainly turning. A recent conversation with a Northern European owner found him reporting that there was ‘no way’ he could go without providing email and even internet access to his crews if he wanted to retain them. Operating specialist high end ships made this an easier call, but the this how the trickle down began on Vsat and that shows no sign of stopping, helped by more innovative software and applications provided by independents.

In the same week, Inmarsat announced its long awaited multi-voice service, otherwise known as the Vocality Box, for Fleetbroadband, allowing up to nine simultaneous telephone calls to be made through a single terminal.

Thrane & Thrane has already announced that multi-voice will be available across its SAILOR FleetBroadband range with upgrades available for existing terminals. The primary advantage is that with multiple handsets integrated to a single terminal, dedicated voice lines can be made available anywhere on board, ‘from the engine room or canteen on a merchant vessel and the public areas on a passenger vessel, to the saloon and staterooms aboard a luxury vessel,’ said T&T’s Casper Jensen.

The extra phone lines will be charged by Inmarsat at the same per-minute tariff for both pre-paid and post-paid calls and will support the free-of-charge ‘505’ emergency calling capability that connects the vessel immediately to a Maritime Rescue Centre.

Ever the combatant, Coles went further than merely welcoming the launch. He claimed the service was ‘superior to internet calling solutions and more cost-effective than accessing multiple voice calls on a standard VSAT,’ something his competitors are bound to throw fire at, Greek fire if they have their act together by Posidonia.