TAMPA, Fla. — Ship owners are increasingly relegating geostationary satellites to the backseat and turning to low Earth orbit (LEO) networks for primary communications at sea, according to a panel of multi-orbit maritime service providers.
Speaking Sept. 17 during the World Satellite Business Week in Paris, Despina Theodosiou, co-CEO of Tototheo Global, said SpaceX’s Starlink LEO constellation poses a growing challenge for legacy geostationary VSAT services and their resellers.
Just a few months ago, she said licensing and other obstacles had largely kept shipping operators from choosing LEO as their primary communications source.
“[But] we’re seeing … large operators as well going for LEO as their primary and for VSAT as their secondary” backup service.
“There are many, many changes that we as service providers need to deal with,” she added, but “this has also created opportunities.”
A Starlink antenna costs $250 compared to the $25,000 price of a VSAT terminal a couple of years ago, KVH Industries CEO Brent Bruun said on the panel.
He said vessels can now get up to 200 megabits per second of service for about a dollar a gigabit, versus 20 Mbps on a typical VSAT for $10 per GB.
These orders of magnitude differences across three different metrics enable video calls and many other activities onboard a ship that used to be confined to land, significantly boosting ship operations and crew morale.
“No one saw this change coming as quickly as it did,” Bruun continued. “This whole market has been turned upside down.”
GEO importance
The panelists agreed that geostationary networks remain an important component of maritime connectivity, particularly for resiliency and applications where latency is not important.
Bruun said over half the Starlink terminals KVH has shipped are being installed in tandem with VSATs able to provide stringent service-level agreements (SLAs), versus SpaceX’s consumer-grade, best-effort service.
Thierry Polycarpe, vice president for global maritime at multi-orbit satellite operator Eutelsat, also said his company has used its geostationary network to carry two terabits of data in a single day for ship-to-shore connectivity.
“There is no doubt [LEO] is creating demand,” Polycarpe said.
“A tremendous amount of demand, coming from all parts of the market.”
But he said the market should avoid getting bogged down in thinking about “what is primary, what is secondary, what is [geostationary], what is LEO — because, down the line, I think what is important to keep in mind is that we need to deliver performance.
“We need to deliver quality of service, and we need to deliver a good experience to the customer or to the end user.”
Simplifying complexity
An abundance of choice creates more opportunities for companies offering bundled products and network management services aiming to reduce complexity.
Tototheo Global’s Theodosiou said overwhelmed shipowners have even been requesting IT management services alongside communications management from the company.
In June, Tototheo Global announced plans to introduce Florida-based Neuron’s artificial intelligence tools across its connected fleet to help better manage customer services.
Other service providers are also doubling down on their increasingly important network management role.
“[W]e’ve taken the software that we own, and that we created years ago for the maritime sector, and effectively recoded it, re-engineered it so that it’s resilient and safe in today’s environment,” said James Trevelyan, executive vice president of global sales at connectivity provider Speedcast.
“And software is really important because it’s all become more complicated, and so the software-defined nature of the network that we have built, and continue to build, is all centered around intelligence.”
In addition to more network flexibility, shipowners are increasingly demanding flexible price plans from their communications providers.
“They don’t like the model of paying one price every month,” Theodosiou noted. “They want to pay-as-you-go or pay what they use.”
She added: “On the one hand, we see that there’s a lot of pressure on us as service providers in terms of pricing, but on the other hand there are opportunities in offering value-added services that can justify a premium price.”
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