Taking Your Ship to an IP Environment

Manoj Mohindra, Inmarsat’s solutions manager, discusses what’s involved for ships upgrading or moving to an IP environment.

When is an ideal time for a ship to consider a new or upgraded IP environment?
Any time. The new technology available is state-of-the-art, compared with traditional maritime communications. You can achieve much higher data speeds than was possible before.

What drivers are causing ships to upgrade?
Here are just a few. First, shipping communities are experiencing huge difficulty in crew retention. We believe that an IP solution — supporting internet cafes and other means for the crew to access the web — will resolve that problem.

It also has the ability to tap into the growing skill set of IT knowledge that a lot of the crew and captains already have. Standard office software is IP based, so a satellite communications system also based on IP will have a familiar look and feel.

Ship owners can also lower their growing operational costs. The increased bandwidth, the “plug and play” capability, and the significant reduction in cost to use and deploy the technology, allow ship owners to achieve much more than with their traditional software.

Is transitioning difficult?
No. Previously, ships had to spend some time in port to allow the installation of the satcoms equipment. Today (and I can only speak for our own terminals) all you need, at most, is one engineer for less than half a day — he can carry the antenna and everything needed onboard with him. The largest compact antenna is 55 centimeters in diameter and about 28 kilograms in weight.

In fact, Maersk had the equipment couriered to its crews on board each vessel, and the crews put it together. I think the quickest they’ve reported having it up and running was a couple of hours. No specialist help was needed.

The location on the ship, however, is key. You must take into account dark spots caused by above-deck structures on the vessel, because satcoms need a direct line of sight to the satellites.

What training is required?
We spend around 1.5 to 2 hours with the captain and about the same amount of time with a second crewmember — usually either the chief engineer or another second officer.

Training (at least at Inmarsat) is absolutely essential. Crew and captains change regularly on ships, so you must have proper training and operational procedures in place for new crews. We’ve found that this can be the biggest weakness of any installation of any system.

For those familiar with using the Internet on shore, how does a satellite link differ at sea?
First, with a satellite you have a finite amount of capacity and throughput. People coming in from the terrestrial side are “misled” by the claims of extremely cheap and unlimited internet access, and they make the assumption that the satellite link is going to be the same. It isn’t. When implementing an application [using satellite] you must take into account that every bit and byte, and every second and minute you’re online, is costing the ship money or using valuable bandwidth. An advantage of IP-based communications, however, is that ship owners and managers can control usage very easily.

Also, there’s a slight delay due to the distance the data must travel — a round trip of 88,000 miles. That delay needs to be managed by the application you’ve installed. Standard applications will work, but they need to be tweaked to optimize that element.

What should a company consider prior to transitioning to an IP environment?
First, the shipping company should sit down and specify the results and benefits they wish to achieve. The company can easily organize a trial. Lots of suppliers are happy to supply two or three weeks of trials at different costs of usage. But a trial would be an excellent way to get the company to develop their own experience of the system.

They also need to determine, prior to installing a satellite terminal on the ship, how people on board are going to access the service. For example, if crewmembers are going to be given access to it, do they have a PC somewhere available on the ship where they can access it?

A company must consider the data leaving the network. The shipping company has to decide if they have adequate provisions for such a data pipe to come into their headquarters and whether it performs as well as it should.

The company must also look at optimization. For example, if the company’s going to allow e-mail, web browsing, online chatting, etc., then the usual IP optimizations are compression, DNS caching, etc. With IP technologies you want to help improve both the apparent speed and reaction of the system, but at the same time reduce the volume of data you are sending and receiving.
Firewall management is absolutely a must.

And finally, we suggest that companies involve crewmembers as early as possible. If a company wants crewmember buy-in, but they haven’t been involved with the project at any stage, they aren’t going to be very enthusiastic.

In This Issue

New Items

Time for the Tough to Get Going

Supply Chain
Real Estate Responds to Supply Chain Shifts

Taking Your Ship to an IP Environment

Compliance Corner: SOPs, the Foundation of Trade Compliance

New Applications for RFID

Features
Gateway at a Glance ­� Canada

Moving Goods in a Slower Economy

Ports & infrastructure
National Gateway — a Public-Private Partnership in Progress

California River Ports

Port Products
Clean Air Equipment

Commentary
Contract Negotiations Approaching

Who, What, Where, When

Final Say