IT and communications for the deep sea commercial shipping sector

Best Practices for Satellite communications

Hi,

I would like to put to discussions the frequency of connections for emails. (Exclude VSAT/MPDS/FBB)

It has brought to my attention that some captain made connections of over 27 times a day! This resulting in a big invoice for SAT Comm.

I would like to know how do guys out here actually set policy or control over this matter?

Best,
Joseph

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Irene Teo on March 2, 2010 at 7:10

Greetings,

It is difficult to set policy due to operations or contingency reason. As such we set up the system onboard to auto connect at least once a day. However, the system will send a short message to the ship of the numbers of messages and the file size held in the shore server. Also, it is a routine for the captain to connect 3 times a day, morning, noon and evening for daily messages. Depending on the operation needs the captain will do manual connections accordingly. From our experience the max. connections for normal port operations is about 10 a day. Mainly charterer instructions and docs for clearance. If ship at sea, we see about max. 4 connections which will include 1 connect for the crew email.

Best,
Irene

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Permalink Reply by Grzegorz Pardyka on December 30, 2010 at 18:01

I agree with Irene, but we have to all remember about one thing which is forgoten in 99% of cases.

The TCP/IP traffic in the network should be optimised for Inmarsat / VSAT connections to save costs and bandwidth.

Example for Fleet Broadband - see attachment

Attachments:

FleetBroadband_Best_Practices_Manual.pdf, 1.7 MB

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Permalink Reply by Ewan Robinson on February 8, 2011 at 15:11

Hi Joseph,

On ships that use legacy systems, they are always advised on 4 hour intervals, no more than 2 hours, but with the standard clause of "unless operational requirements require more". Anything urgent from shore is notified to ship via sat-c for connection. This has controlled costs enormously, but is an ongoing struggle. For the server and connection system I designed in house, its all automated and they send/receive emails every 30 minutes, which keeps all parties happy with the frequency. This helped reduce vessel comms costs per month to just over 1000 USD including all voice/fax and data.

Cheers

Ewan

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Permalink Reply by Jean Marc Duc on June 15, 2011 at 12:27

Hi,

we all know this kind of behavior where the captain makes dozens of check mail each day very often for nothing. A simple way to avoid this is to use automatic notification. SkyFile Mail, the famous and very popular free-of-charge emailing software, provides such a service. after activation, it allows the master to receive a short notification on his Inmarsat C or by SMS over BGan, Iridium, Thuraya, FBB and so on saying that a new mail has been received and stored in his mailbox. it can be a notification per email (in that case, for Inmarsat C, a single notification is sent while the first email is stored) or a notification for urgent emails in the case the word "urgent" is somewhere in the subject field of the mail. this very simple procedure decreases significantly the number of dial-in (Check mail) per day.