Nowadays everyone has internet at home. It is day to day business to check your email, surf in search of information, make telephone calls, ... Unfortunately when you are on board this becomes a whole different ballgame. If there is internet on board it is often slow (yes, very slow like using those modems in the 80's slow) and comes with a very high price tag running into thousands of dollars if you are not careful what you send and receive. 'Accidentally' downloading a movie could cost you more than USD 10.000. Better charter a helicopter to take you to the theater.
Even though prices for Airtime (the actual satellite internet connection) have been gradually decreasing, the regular rates remain very high due to the high cost of satellites and their 'limited' use in comparison to terrestrial broadband. However, recently two way internet via satellite systems have been appearing in Europe to cover those areas where normal cabled or terrestrial wireless (GSM, GPRS and UMTS) solutions were not available. With this new boom in satellite internet use it has also become possible to reduce the airtime cost making satellite internet connection affordable.
Internet at sea will probably never be as fast as their land based counterpart (unless you have huge resources) but they are coming close to broadband solutions offered today in homes and offices, but 2 Mb download speeds (and even 4 Mb) are rapidly becoming available giving you almost the same high speed experience as cabled land based solutions.
At Satmarin we have taken the best of both worlds and combined the technologies in an extremely powerful, fast and reliable system for a fraction of the cost of other Maritime VSAT solutions currently offered.
VSAT stands for Very Small Aperture Terminal - it's a catchy acronym and as such it has been adopted by all and sundry for every type of satellite product from small components of a system to complete systems. Because the term really hinges around the small size of the antenna it has been used to describe both one-way and interactive systems. Specifically, we in the industry, isolate television broadcast receivers because counting these as well would simply distort the numbers in the marketplace. Data, audio and, to some extent, voice systems are included.
Generally, these systems operate in the Ku-band and C-band frequencies. As a rule of thumb C-band (which suffers less from rain attenuation, but requires larger antennas) is used in Asia, Africa and Latin America whilst Ku-band (which can use smaller antennas, but suffers from rain fade in a monsoon-like downpour) is used in Europe and North America. Typically, interactive Ku-band antenna sizes range from 60 centimeters to 1.8 meter. One way systems can use antennas as small as 45 centimeters
If your organisation requires a number of remote users to have internet access in location not covered by regular land based ADSL then a VSAT satellite communications network is worth considering.
A typical satellite based network can have 100s of small remote VSAT antennas located on customer offices, on mobile units providing data communications via a large central 11m hub antenna. A landline optic fibre data link connects the hub antenna to the customer's head office. The VSAT service provider has a number of customers, thus sharing the hub costs and satellite lease costs. One hub antenna might serve several thousand VSAT antennas.
Possible VSAT applications include: point of sale, Internet access, file distribution, database access, environmental monitoring, police, customs and excise offices. VSAT systems provide data and if required voice services.
VSAT systems are attractive where the coverage area is large, where quick installation is required and where terrestrial alternatives are difficult to organize.
General purpose VSAT terminals are now becoming common. These essentially provide broadband internet access and allow web browsing and emails. Costs can be quite low if your burst speed bit rate capacity is shared with many other terminals using the same satellite capacity. For example 30 VSATs may all share the same 512k down / 64k up capacity. This works fine for internet browsing but is unsuited to Voice calls or video streaming which would cause congestion. If VoIP is required then higher monthly cost dedicated continuous information rate (CIR) service is preferred.
