Inmarsat offers new Fleet One Pacific Northwest fisheries plan
SEPTEMBER 26, 2017 — Inmarsat Maritime has launched a new fishing pricing plan for the Pacific Northwest that will make it easier and more economical for regional Fleet One users to get
SEPTEMBER 26, 2017 — Inmarsat Maritime has launched a new fishing pricing plan for the Pacific Northwest that will make it easier and more economical for regional Fleet One users to get
SEPTEMBER 21, 2017 — Satellite communications provider Inmarsat and Rolls-Royce have signed a Letter of Intent to make the Rolls-Royce Energy Management system optionally available via Inmarsat Maritime’s Fleet Xpress high speed
JULY 13, 2017 — LaConner, WA, headquartered Dunlap Towing Company is to install Inmarsat Fleet One across its 12 vessel fleet. For Dunlap, the Dutch Harbor and Pacific Coast routes in Alaskan
JUNE 15, 2017 – Inmarsat (LSE: ISAT.L) has responded to high levels of demand for its Fleet Xpress service by increasing from six to 33 the number of ports where a complete
MARCH 28, 2017 — Over twenty partners in Norway’s Blue Maritime Cluster joined senior Inmarsat management for a digital disruption workshop in Ålesund, Norway, on March 21, to explore Inmarsat’s future bandwidth
High profile customers and technology partners are swiftly committing to shipping’s new era of connectivity through a series of agreements to use the world’s first global maritime high-speed broadband service from a single network operator. Officially launched on March 30, Inmarsat Maritime’s revolutionary Fleet Xpress has unleashed the power of ‘big data’ to enhance vessel efficiency, while delivering transformational but cost-controlled connectivity to the maritime industry..
Fleet Xpress delivers high-speed data transmission with unmatched reliability, switching automatically between Ka-band and Inmarsat FleetBroadband L-band services to ensure constant coverage.
“Fleet Xpress alters the asset management capabilities and frontline working experience of an entire industry,” says Inmarsat Maritime President, Ronald Spithout. “It will optimize vessel safety, security and efficiency, and meet the connectivity needs of the modern seafarer that have for too long been overlooked.”
Separate agreements announced in June with VSAT service providers Marlink and SpeedCast International suggest that leading maritime value added service providers agree. Both organisations already describe Fleet Xpress as key to their maritime services portfolios. SpeedCast says the service is fully integrated within its SIGMA gateway, while Marlink emphasises access to a range of options that include its XChange communication management platform, with ‘Bring Your Own Device’ crew connectivity.
SpeedCast and Marlink have committed to roll out Fleet Xpress to approximately 2,000 vessels apiece over the next five years.
Market migration
Direct agreements with shipowners also quickly followed the Fleet Xpress service launch. Early contracts were announced covering installations on 70 Nanjing Tanker Corporation ships.
However, the appeal of Fleet Xpress is not limited to the cargo-carrying ship sector. Even before its commercial launch, trials on the ice-class adventure ship Ocean Nova in Antarctica delivered the low-horizon satellite views through heavy cloud cover and precipitation that operators routinely face in such hostile waters. So satisfactory were the trials that owner Nova Cruising Ltd committed to the commercial installation of Fleet Xpress.
“Fleet Xpress delivered on its promise of high-speed seamless mobile broadband in one of the world’s most difficult areas for most satellite systems,” says Dr Luis Soltero, Chief Technology Officer of project partner Global Marine Networks.
In early June, Inmarsat announced a first commitment to Fleet Xpress from a superyacht owner, for the 44m sail yacht Juliet at Royal Huisman Shipyard, the Netherlands. The project involved installation of a new Sailor 100GX VSAT system and the Inmarsat GX bespoke below deck equipment configuration.
Gerbrand Schalkwijk, Chief Sales Officer, Inmarsat Maritime, says the maritime package has been eagerly anticipated by an industry seeking to take advantage of high-speed Ka-band with ultra-reliable FleetBroadband L-band service acting as unlimited backup. “We expect up to 1,000 ships will be using Fleet Xpress before the end of 2016,” he says.
For the first time, he explains, ship/shore connectivity is so reliable that service agreements can include network availability guarantees, with minimum and maximum of data throughput “so that customers know in advance what they are paying for”. Fleet Xpress also brings ‘Inmarsat Gateway’ access, which “effectively connects ships to landside offices via VPN”, opening up a new world of content-rich applications for shipping.
Enabling change
For its part, Inmarsat Maritime is cultivating the ‘service ecosystem’ for smarter shipping. It has approved new generation antenna systems from Cobham, JRC, and Intellian to meet requirements, but also devised the Certified Application Partner (CAP) programme to encourage the development of software and hardware that is compatible with Fleet Xpress.
The CAP programme offers a framework for maritime big data to drive smarter shipping. It looks beyond more timely updates of more data, better voyage planning, remote monitoring/ diagnostics, and better repair scheduling, to more imaginative applications: telemedicine; video conferencing; and video surveillance, to name but three. An Inmarsat Developer Conference, held in London earlier this year to hear presentations from existing and potential CAP partners was heavily oversubscribed.
At the industry’s leading edge of technology, Inmarsat is also a partner in the Advanced Autonomous Waterborne Applications Initiative (AAWA), led by Rolls-Royce. Funded by the Finnish research institute Tekes, the €6.6 million project runs until 2017. “Fleet Xpress delivers the vital ship-to-shore communications required to support the remote control functionality fundamental to the realisation of the autonomous ship,” says Inmarsat Maritime President Spithout.
Whatever the outcomes of this radical scheme, Inmarsat expects it to yield tangible progress for data transfer ship-ship and ship-shore, with significant consequences for the way ships are managed and worked at sea.
Life at sea transformed
In the more immediate term, ship crews working today will be among those feeling the most significant transformation due to Fleet Xpress. The seafaring life still consists of extended periods of working under pressure, punctuated by opportunities for intense boredom. It also continues to involve long periods of separation from family, friends and the world at large, adding up to a burden of isolation.
This is despite the fact that, according that the Maritime Labour Convention: ‘Every seafarer should have reasonable access to ship-to-shore telephone communications, email and Internet facilities, where available, with any charges for the use of these services being reasonable in amount.’
Drew Brandy, Senior-Vice President, Inmarsat Maritime points out that 73% of seafarers take into account ship-shore connectivity when deciding which ship to join, according to the 2015 Crew Connectivity Survey from Futurenautics. The same survey reports seafarers on average bringing three communication devices onboard ship, with 77% now carrying a Smartphone.
Meeting seafarer expectations of access to VOIP and Video Chat services will be a key plus point for Fleet Xpress bandwidth because owners will be able to do so without compromising their operating costs. The migration of existing customers from XpressLink Ku-band services to the Ka-band based Fleet Xpress will “double the bandwidth available at no additional cost,” according to Brandy.
Critical momentum
If emerging crew attitudes are a spur and global end-user agreements suggest shipping is easing into the Ka-band era, the recent appointment of Satlink Satellite Communications as a further Inmarsat partner may also be telling. Satlink, whose Satbox and Tracklite service will become integrated as ‘value added’ features of Fleet Xpress, is the largest single XpressLink provider for Inmarsat globally. Its customer base includes MSC Shipmanagement Limited and Columbia Shipmanagement Ltd.
Inmarsat Maritime has separately disclosed intentions to transition more than 2,600 existing XpressLink installations and convert its committed XpressLink backlog to Fleet Xpress over the next three years.
Maritime President Spithout believes the opportunity for an industry transition is now ripe. “We are already committed to future service enhancements by contracting Airbus to build the first two satellites for our sixth-generation I-6 fleet. But the partnerships we have put in place for Fleet Xpress and our engagements on hardware, software, service and distribution mean that the tipping point for maritime communications as a whole is 2016, not at some time in the future.”
JULY 12, 2016 — Freezer-longliner fishing vessel operator Alaskan Leader Fisheries, Lynden, WA, has chosen Inmarsat’s new high-speed broadband maritime communications service Fleet Xpress to support its daily business operations. Inmarsat partner
JUNE 13, 2016 — Inmarsat has entered into two into a strategic partnerships. One is with leading maritime communication and maritime VSAT operator Marlink, and will see Inmarsat’s new Fleet Xpress service
Looking like a teaser for an upcoming Star Trek movie, a six-minute video posted by Rolls-Royce last month lays out its high-tech vision of unmanned cargo ships and the future of shipping.
At the heart of that vision is a sophisticated, cutting-edge, land-based control center with interactive smart screens, voice recognition systems, and 3D holographic images of the ship and its equipment. An officer sits in a command chair before the “OX global wall,” which provides a worldwide overview of shipping traffic. Flying drones launched from the unmanned ship are the operator’s eyes in the sky to monitor navigation, security, weather and inspect the ship itself.
In the video, Rolls-Royce envisions a small crew of 7 to 14 people that will monitor and control the operation of a fleet of vessels across the world.
Last year, Rolls-Royce announced it would lead the Advanced Autonomous Waterborne Applications Initiative—a new EURO6.6 million project to explore, develop and design autonomous ships.
Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, is providing the funding for the project, which will run until the end of 2017.
The Advanced Autonomous Waterborne Applications Initiative (AAWAI) brings together expertise from academia and industry. The participants include Finnish academic researchers from Tampere University of Technology, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, Åbo Akademi University, Aalto University, and the University of Turku. Besides Rolls-Royce, industry participants include NAPA, Deltamarin, DNV GL and Inmarsat.
Iiro Lindborg, Rolls-Royce’s General Manager, Remote & Autonomous Operations, Ship Intelligence, says, “unmanned and remote-controlled transportation systems will become a common feature of human life. They offer unprecedented flexibility and operational efficiency.” Lindborg says the research “aims to understand the human factors involved in monitoring and operating ships remotely. It identifies ways crews ashore can use tools to get a realistic feel for what is happening at sea.”
The video is the final stage of research that will inform the design and construction of a project demonstrator before the end of this decade.
An effective remote operations center is essential to the company’s plans to develop autonomous and remote controlled vessels.
Eija Kaasinen, Principal Scientist at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland Ltd., points out that unmanned ships doesn’t take humans out of the picture totally. “Unmanned ships need to be monitored and controlled and this will require entirely new kinds of work roles, tasks, tools and environments. The future shore control center concept has been designed by emphasizing the user experience of the human operators. By focusing on the operators’ point of view, it is possible to introduce meaningful, pleasurable and engaging new roles for the ships’ shore control center professionals.”
The research was undertaken by VTT and University of Tampere research centre TAUCHI (Tampere Unit for Computer Human Interaction) in collaboration with Rolls-Royce. It explored the lessons learned from other industries where remote operation is commonplace, such as aviation, energy, defense, and space exploration.
It uses the InnoLeap approach, a VTT and Rolls-Royce-developed initiative for concept design and presentation of academic studies in a graphic format that is based on trend and user studies, co-innovation, scenario stories and visualizations.
On April 5, in Helsinki, Finland, Rolls-Royce will reveal separate research findings, which it believes will set the direction for the development of remote and autonomous shipping.
Remote and autonomous ships are one of three elements of the company’s Ship Intelligence strategy, a portfolio of products and services – comprising health management solutions, optimization and decision support, and remote and autonomous operations – which intended to enable customers to transform their operations by harnessing the power of big data.
Rauli Hulkkonen, Tekes, Chief Advisor, thinks the project is a “fantastic opportunity to establish the Finnish maritime cluster as the world leader in maritime remote control technology.”
Esa Jokioinen, Head of Rolls-Royce’s Blue Ocean Team, says, “We are excited to be taking the first concrete steps towards making remote controlled and autonomous ship applications a reality.”
The Rolls-Royce Blue Ocean team is responsible for R&D of future maritime technologies.
Rolls-Royce is not alone in investigating the feasibility of unmanned ships. The European Commission has just completed work on project MUNIN (Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks) to develop concepts for unmanned ships. The EURO3.8 million MUNIN project focused on a dry bulk carrier concept, which typically carry cargo point-to-point on long, uninterrupted deep-sea voyages.
The goal of the projects is to reduce crew costs, lower environmental impact, and reduce the number of collisions. Human error plays a role in about 80 percent of maritime accidents.
MUNIN says that the issues of cyber attacks and pirates are a cause for concern. “However, software systems as well as ships can be designed and built providing a very high resilience against digital and physical attacks.”
HUNTING SUBS BY DRONE SHIP
Drones have been used effectively on the military side for years for surveillance, reconnaissance, and military strikes. Last month, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) reported that its Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program has designed, developed and constructed an entirely new class of ocean-going vessel—one intended to traverse thousands of kilometers over the open seas for months at a time, all without a single crew member aboard.
The ACTUV technology demonstration vessel was recently transferred to water at shipbuilder Vigor Industrial, Portland, OR, and conducted speed tests in which it reached a top speed of 27 knots (31 mph/50 kph).
The ACTUV would be used to track quiet diesel-electric submarines.
The vessel is scheduled to be christened on April 7, 2016, with open-water testing planned to begin in summer 2016 off the California coast.
MARCH 1, 2016—Inmarsat, the leading provider of global mobile satellite communications, has marked the 25th anniversary of Inmarsat C by revealing that more than 600 distress alerts from vessels in urgent need