Staying in the game is more important than the shape of the ball

Inmarsat was far from the only game in town at the recent SMM widget-fest. Its partners and suppliers were also keen to have their say and reinforce the theory that this will be a long game with no simple winner and multiple routes to glory.

Even Inmarsat’s occasional nemesis Alan Gottleib used his most recent SatNews article to do little more than list the alternatives on offer, having spent some paragraphs denouncing the incumbent of course.

Whether this really is, as Gottleib contends, a ‘flags-unfurled, raging battle’ is very much open to question. As Inmarsat’s partners see it, the old lady’s moves to launch a VSAT solution, increase its direct sales efforts, raise prices and insist on loyalty from its customers, simply underscore a broader thesis: shipping is entering a world of choice and in future Inmarsat will be just one flavour to choose from.

Though I did find evidence of unhappiness with Inmarsat’s price changes earlier this year, which put pressure on partners without sharing any of the upside, most of the people I spoke to were to an extent phlegmatic. The timing was probably more of an issue than the price increases themselves.

The partners are quick to admit that the cost of satcoms has fallen dramatically over the past few years. Two or three years ago for example, there were few VSAT offers for less than $4,000 a month whereas they now start from $1,500. The fact that margins have been coming down across the market means that partners have long been planning to maintain profitability and not just on L-band offers.

Most also agree that the shift to higher bandwidth services would come slowly, though the need by owners to move from small, discrete packets of data over narrowband would transition to genuine ‘always-on’ monitoring off the ship and more traffic from shore too.

Where business-critical applications are imperative to save costs and optimise the operations, the move from MSS to VSAT should quicken. Inmarsat understands this too of course but for its partners there is more interest in providing a portfolio of solutions, with bundles of satellite access and applications, than in being tied to a proprietary one-size provider.

The danger here is that should that proprietary service fail, users won’t have much to fall back on. But by combining VSAT and MSS, they have the ability to mix and match and can choose levels of service and support that suit them.

This is true of purchase options too, with the re-branded Astrium and its Maritime DP Marlink for one offering access bundles that mimic L-band, as a stepping stone to higher capacity, fixed-fee VSAT packages.

Many partners admitted they see plenty of good potential in Global Xpress but actual bandwidth remains an issue. One told me that users should expect an average a throughput of around 512KB and that Inmarsat might do itself a favour by stopping the talk of tens of megabits and upwards as this was unrealistic and ultimately unhelpful to end users.

If one subscribes to the argument above then just as B begat Fleet and Fleetbroadband and thus VSAT, then 512KB will soon be used up and the desire for megabytes and above will quickly follow, even though users can afford to be agnostic about the supplier.

In certain sectors – cruise and ferry, offshore and big tankers and LNG carriers – this trend will happen faster. But some of these sectors could also be fragmented by increased amounts of data moving across GSM for coastal and near-shore shipping.

There was interest too in Intelsat EPIC, though this was tempered with the realisation that it would first take a slice of energy and offshore comms rather than the merchant sector. What seems more relevant is that Intelsat is likely to be able to deliver speeds that will trump GX that users of specialist applications will find attractive.

The fact that EPIC offers not just scale but a combination of Ku, Ka and C band means that in hotspots such as offshore Brazil and China and in northern latitudes, customers will get the service they sign up for. Inmarsat for its part says it can move throughput around to double its 512KB offer to over 1MB but until the system is up and fully operational, how much bandwidth will be actually available will remain open to question.

That means that this isn’t a battle to the death as some seem determined to insist, but rather an increase in choice and a lowering of risk. L-band is cheap, robust and reliable and can offer major ocean and pole-to-pole coverage depending on the provider. VSAT is burgeoning and HTS will bring a new level of service in specialist sectors.

Asked what he thought about this year’s spats and brickbats, one Inmarsat partner agreed the trick was to ‘pay attention to everybody but don’t believe everything you read. There is still a market for all these services’.