HTS have breathed new life into a number of traditional satellite verticals — but the additional bandwidth still isn’t enough to satisfy the connectivity demands of cruise and passenger ship operators. At SATELLITE 2018, a panel of maritime executives said they felt constrained by the slow evolution of ground hardware.
“In 2000, the amount of bandwidth we were providing for our entire fleet of ships is the amount of bandwidth we are providing to a single user in our larger ships today,” said Guillermo Muniz, director of satellite and network engineering for Royal Caribbean Cruises. “We’re seeing a doubling of capacity consumption about every three years.”
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Speedcast CEO Pierre-Jean Beylier noted the landscape is changing faster than ship operators can upgrade. “The networks that have been built to serve cruise ships were not built for that type of usage,” Beylier said. “There are ships that could not make use of 1 GB of satellite capacity because the on-board infrastructure cannot handle it.”
Reza Rasoulian, vice president of global connectivity and shipboard technology for Carnival, added: “In the ground segment, we need to make sure there’s a seamless process for beam switching in an HTS environment. We still haven’t completely solved that issue.”
Fabio Agostini, CIO for Silversea Cruises, said he hopes for more end-to-end management from service providers. “We don’t want to have our own expertise. We sell emotion and entertainment — we don’t sell technology to our guests.”
On LEO constellations, Agostini was skeptical: “The one advantage LEO has is low latency, but latency is not the biggest issue on board. It will be more about price per megabit and total cost of ownership.” VS
