The VSAT challenge – be more like Inmarsat?

It’s DigitalShip Athens this week and a welcome chance to take the temperature of the comms market over two days of speeches, debate and I suspect, just a little alcohol. Looking at the programme, one might expect a little unfriendly rivalry between the L-band and VSAT fraternities. Except that for the most part, the latter are not there this year.

True, we can expect some disruptive talk from the first few speakers – Inmarsat’s Frank Coles, Globecomm’s Gregor Ross and Thuraya’s Geoff Davidson in particular – but for the most part the VSAT crowd will be in the audience or in the exhibition.

There at least they will be joined by owners who are presumably getting ready to sling more Greek fire on Inmarsat for promising not to raise prices on FleetBroadband but then raising them pretty much everywhere else.

But the fact that Inmarsat will likely dominate proceedings is not just down to history or sponsorship dollars in my view. Recent conversations about the nature of the maritime market and the satellite supply chain suggest to me that biggest problem VSAT has in more deeply penetrating the maritime market is as much about brand and marketing as it is about service delivery.

Put bluntly, there are too many VSAT re-sellers chasing maritime dollars – by some estimates perhaps as many as 90 of them – but since there are not that many satellites in the sky, the majority of these vendors are really consolidators, re-selling bandwidth from the other satellite operators.

The big names in the FSS market, including Intelsat, SES Astra and Eutelsat provide the capacity and like Inmarsat et al, use distributors to sell to maritime and other mobility users. But not all of these have a solid appreciation of the market or much of an idea about how to address it.

Even so, they are targeting mobility users – in part because they have read about the growth potential in maritime and figured that it is better to get on the boat, wherever its destination.

But more problematic for buyers and airtime providers alike is that these vendors lack the unified approach that Inmarsat – and Iridium and Thuraya for that matter – can offer the market.

This leads to a somewhat exasperating situation whereby a shipowner may have on his desk three proposals for FleetBroadband which will all be more or less the same, give or take a few cents here and some megabytes there. In another pile will be the VSAT proposals; all different, possibly contradictory and probably more complex.

It’s hardly surprising that for shipowners of a certain kind, the commodity market approach of the L-band airtime vendors has made it very easy for service partners to sell their products when compared to what appears a more complex and initially more expensive alternative.

There are only a few VSAT distributors – Astrium is one and KVH another – that appear to understand the need to sell solutions, not equipment and airtime and that they need to do it under a single unified brand that their customers understand. The traditional maritime solution has been ‘take this pain away from me’ but nowadays it’s more likely to be ‘I need something or crew calling: tell me why I need VSAT and what is this HTS thing is all about’.

I still think that while IT managers and perhaps other senior staff want or need to know what they are using and where, the average seafarer genuinely cares little. It’s a little like turning on the tap – as long as you get clean water at the right pressure, then all is well.

It’s for that reason too that the more maritime-focussed VSAT re-sellers have been buying extended coverage in busy ocean regions. They understand that one of the reasons why users buy Inmarsat is because people look and the coverage map and conclude they would be stupid to buy a version that looks as if Dr Frankenstein has stitched it together (and is still working on patching the holes).

However successful, Inmarsat’s direct sales efforts have been, that advantage applies to XpressLink because even though what sits behind it is the same as the other VSAT vendors, the brand has immediate recognition and implied value. It transfers to Inmarsat GX too, although, just like FleetBroadband, the deployment of coverage will take time to be fully in place and even once it is, the data rates are not going to be anything like the sticker speed for most people.

Shipping, despite what its detractors say, is a commodity business and as anyone who has tried to sell a shipowner anything will tell you, pricing reflects that. It may be possible as Frank Coles believes, to get owners to spend more money on their communications. To some extent the success of VSAT in penetrating the market for high end owners has proven that.

How ironic then if those VSAT vendors, having first disrupted the market are unable to capitalise on the upswing in demand for higher bandwidth services for want of the scale they need to do so. Especially since they kicked open the door in the first place.