Three’s a crowd?

Tricky thing, announcing a major service launch when you are in  quiet period pre-IPO but Intelsat has managed it with a minimum of publicity, despite the potential magnitude of its plans.

Using a stealthy combination of website updates  and a press release  the satellite major announced it will order at least two new satellites to provide a high capacity Ku-band spot beam service in the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions and the platform for of EpicNG.

EpicNG will include a complementary overlay to its fixed satellite network and will be fully integrated with Intelsat’s existing satellite fleet, using a combination of C-band, Ku-band and Ka-band to deliver world-wide broadband coverage.

The satellites will be in service by 2015 and 2016 respectively and if Intelsat’s sales story is right, provide four to five times more capacity per satellite than its traditional fleet with total throughput ‘in the range of 25-60 Gbps’.

Observers at first concluded that this was a total, not per-satellite figure meaning they would provide throughput at rates closer to 12Gbps in service, similar to Inmarsat’s GlobalXpress, including its high capacity overlay beams.

But late last week Intelsat confirmed that the throughput figure of 25-60 Gbps is per satellite – significantly greater than the GX per satellite throughput. The satellites will be integrated into its legacy maritime coverage in a move that will see it compete head-on with not just Inmarsat but Viasat too.

Intelsat has yet to confirm its distribution partners for the new service but the company has clearly decided that three is the ideal number of VSAT players in the maritime communications space, where it has already operated for some years.

PS – Kudos to Intelsat for not being afraid of continuing the buzzword bingo with liberal-use of ‘customer-centric’ in all its material. Services designed for users are something we can all approve of.

Old words for old (and new) problems

It’s good to see a modern maritime journal digging out the language of (almost) another age to describe the current one. This works fine except when the sub-editors are younger than you and therefore baffled by your use of antique terms.

When Safety at Sea described owners as ‘hidebound’ for not investing in more technology onboard ship it was enough to make me reach for my Webster’s, fill a pipe or two and settle by a roaring fire, except that it’s June and I don’t smoke a pipe.

What SASI meant – though the point was that of Inmarsat Maritime president Frank Coles – was that owners are hindering the greater use of high technology applications onboard ship through reluctance to put their hands in their pockets.

Noting that the shipping industry is ‘a fairly conservative place’ is not exactly new though Coles is closer to the point when he says that there is a dearth (there we go again) of talent working for shipowners who ‘grew up in the IT explosion’.

Shipowners he continued were ‘not ready to embrace IT and few shipowning companies ‘have extensive IT environments’. Again only partially true. The clients I work for are as connected as they come – on the landside at least. And when I asked one recently if he could ask the master of a ship something for me, he replied back advising that I could ask the master myself, copying him in. A response was back within hours.

I suspect that the reason why shipping companies have resisted IT onboard ship is partly generational. This is not just that the people that run ships distrust computers as flaky inventions of long haired college drop-outs, but that some owners think these same people should concentrate on running the ship rather than fiddling with computers.

Such computerphobia is far from unique but there are practical reasons too – ships are also places of heavy industry, where chunky bits of equipment hold sway and anything fragile or temperamental could be a risk rather than a benefit.

The other issue is of course, cost. Satcoms equipment – above and below decks – is expensive but then so is launching satellite constellations and providing a service that aims a beam at a target that is moving in multiple directions.

But given that you buy your satcoms with your newbuilding and that you might expect to upgrade perhaps twice in the life of the vessel, the cost is hardly prohibitive. It is more accurate to say that owners think satellite communications are expensive in practice, whereas in fact the price has fallen for a decade and continues to fall.

Coles points out that a service that costs ‘less than 1% of daily running costs’ is hardly prohibitive. Unfortunately for service providers and not just Inmarsat, the recession in shipping provides a perfect excuse for owners to delay investment in new systems and services because they are being massacred by bunker costs and unable to prise better freight rates out of charterers.

The recent ending by Inmarsat of volume discounts and the price rise on pay-as-you-go FleetBroadband may not help his case with his sternest critics, but the central point is true enough – there is no excuse these days for poor ship-shore-ship communications.

The tide is certainly turning. A recent conversation with a Northern European owner found him reporting that there was ‘no way’ he could go without providing email and even internet access to his crews if he wanted to retain them. Operating specialist high end ships made this an easier call, but the this how the trickle down began on Vsat and that shows no sign of stopping, helped by more innovative software and applications provided by independents.

In the same week, Inmarsat announced its long awaited multi-voice service, otherwise known as the Vocality Box, for Fleetbroadband, allowing up to nine simultaneous telephone calls to be made through a single terminal.

Thrane & Thrane has already announced that multi-voice will be available across its SAILOR FleetBroadband range with upgrades available for existing terminals. The primary advantage is that with multiple handsets integrated to a single terminal, dedicated voice lines can be made available anywhere on board, ‘from the engine room or canteen on a merchant vessel and the public areas on a passenger vessel, to the saloon and staterooms aboard a luxury vessel,’ said T&T’s Casper Jensen.

The extra phone lines will be charged by Inmarsat at the same per-minute tariff for both pre-paid and post-paid calls and will support the free-of-charge ‘505’ emergency calling capability that connects the vessel immediately to a Maritime Rescue Centre.

Ever the combatant, Coles went further than merely welcoming the launch. He claimed the service was ‘superior to internet calling solutions and more cost-effective than accessing multiple voice calls on a standard VSAT,’ something his competitors are bound to throw fire at, Greek fire if they have their act together by Posidonia.

When a Tom Hanks movie just isn’t enough

Proving there is absolutely no-one like an American for a highly developed sense of bathos, it seems that more than half the crew of Maersk Alabama have decided that resisting pirates, being rescued by Navy Seals and immortalisation by Hollywood just aren’t enough by way of fame and have decided to sue Maersk for putting them in harm’s way.

The plaintiffs allege that the crew manager and Maersk ignored warnings to stay further away from the coast than the ship’s position when it was attacked. Despite behaving in an apparently heroic fashion, having thought long and hard about it, they think Maersk should pay out for their injuries and post-traumatic stress. Maersk called the case ‘meritless’.

While not making too much light of a grim situation, it should be observed that there are hundreds of seafarers who have been worse treated than the crew of the Alabama but it is the latter who are far better placed to launch expensive lawsuits than many of these. If they win of course, then the floodgates will open.

Precedent – and the fact that the USCG approved the vessel’s security plan – mean some doubts remain. But won’t release of the Tom Hanks blockbuster due to hit cinema screens in March somewhat prejudice the outcome of the trial, should it happen?

Intelsat unveils IPO plans – yes you read it here too

OK so we’re hardly the first with this – and frankly not the most insightful at this stage but here’s some news the market has been expecting – .

We’ll come back to this in due course – not least because opinion seems to be a little divided as to whether this is interesting or not.

Satellite Today noted that ‘the potential IPO looks as though it will finally happen and will be ‘very interesting’ according to Sarah Simon, a satellite equity analyst at Berenberg. Unfortunately Satellite Today’s paywall prevents us from knowing more at this point.

The Reuters piece seems to take the opposite view – Francis Gaskins, a partner at IPOdesktop.com describing the IPO as  means to pay down debt rather than plan for growth. You can read it for yourself of course but Gaskins called the offering was not “particularly exciting”.

We’ll come back to this in due course – perhaps to look at how the IPO fares in this terrible equity market, but also to take a look at Intelsat’s maritime play, which claims speeds of 50MB, which if accurate, puts it ahead of Inmarsat’s Global Xpress.

LOLCATS good: wonky self-publishing, not so much

The internet, I think we can agree is a marvellous thing. It has transformed our lives, allowing us to interact with handheld devices rather than talk to boring people and to access video of animals doing amusing things at high speed and relatively low cost.

The shopping is pretty good and it has serious applications too of course, enabling the propagation of revolutionary ideas and concepts, giving succour to movements and uprisings and disintermediating the traditional gatekeepers of news and knowledge.

This too has up and down sides. While it is said that everyone has one novel in them, publishers have long known that many should stay there. The internet has removed this check and balance and allowed everyone to become an author, regardless of ability, not to mention their command of language and the veracity of their statements.

Some would counter that this lets the ‘real people’ bypass ‘the man’ who wants to stamp out their attempts to speak truth to power. But the problem with this thesis, as I’m not the first to observe is that it’s very hard to trust the information you find, or to understand its motivation, without the intervention of an editor and a publisher, whose motivations are usually better known.

It’s also worth noting that ‘real people’ with a real story to tell have numerous outlets in which to get their material published. A good story will always interest a good editor, but he will make sure that the piece adheres to some basic concepts, like accuracy, balance and an awareness of the commercial interests behind it.

So what happens when the writer sets himself up as editor and publisher, using the new tools of communication as well as the old, to press a point of view on a presumably interested public?

Well, you get something like the stream of conversations, articles and presentations currently clogging the news boards and magazine pages on the subject of Inmarsat’s price increases from the start of this month. These fall into two distinct categories, though it seems a shame even to have to point them out.

There are dedicated maritime IT journalists whose job is to report the news, get the facts right and present a balanced view along with informed insight and opinion. This is a small constituency but an important one because, despite these publications being solidly commercial ventures, they adhere to the basic principles of journalism noted above and are mostly transparent about their intentions.

The second group are those for whom self-publishing your thoughts and ideas on LinkedIn is fine and dandy, but here are a few points to remember when reading the latter:

• A posting or article that starts out by claiming it is acting for the good of the maritime industry then turns into a sales pitch for a product or service half way through is not a public service, it is an advertisement. The ‘good of the maritime industry’ by the way, is a difficult concept to pin down but in my experience, it normally involves people complaining that either nobody understands them, or that making money is harder than ever and they deserve (eg) tax breaks, better freight rates, lower costs and regulators who appreciate how hard their life is. Nobody talks about the good of the maritime industry being about owners not ordering too many ships and exacerbating the current earnings slump;

• A posting or article that does not bother to seek comment or clarification from the companies it is profiling, does not check facts or present a balanced view of any given situation should be treated with caution. If a writer is going to mount an attack on a company he has to know the company and understand it. This is what separates (for example) analysts from self-appointed internet journalists. If the company won’t let them in the door or engage with them, then the reader should take this into consideration before forming their own opinion;

• An article that couples personal opinion of questionable veracity with a commercial interest that is not openly and clearly declared is of very little value.

Frank Coles interview Part 3 – Inmarsat will compete to survive

So far Inmarsat Maritime president Frank Coles has put up a robust defence of the company’s strategy and an informed one too. His time served at SP GlobeWireless, where he sold Inmarsat and its alternatives, gave him enough of an insight into how the company worked to make his move there to run the maritime business a natural one.

I was keen to know whether Inmarsat would completely take the gloves off against its competition. After all, they have used every trick in the book against him and in the sound and thunder stakes they are certainly getting the column inches. Volume is not always a good indicator of quality, however, so just what is the strategy?

“Perception is reality to some extent and I’ve been very specific; we are not going to go direct to customers, but we are going to go after Iridium and KVH and competing VSAT offers,” he says.

The upshot is that if its channel partners are selling those products too, it might receive less favourable treatment from Inmarsat – though the airtime rates it receives are common to all DPs.

“Inmarsat has to grow its business and though some people want Inmarsat to sink quietly, we are a public company with customers, employees, a board and shareholders and we have a responsibility to each of those,” he adds.

Though the channel partners ‘are free to sell whatever they want,’ in reality that means that the Coles business plan is to churn KVH and Iridium. He has tasked the Inmarsat sales force to go after that business; channel partners will receive a competitive hardware and airtime offer to bring new customers to Inmarsat, but he reserves the right to target the same customers using other channel partners too if they don’t play ball.

“That is competition. Iridium is doing the same thing in giving away their hardware free any chance they get. KVH’s entire marketing plan is anti-Inmarsat not pro-KVH. Are we supposed to continue to be stately old chap who stands there and gets kicked? If you want to compete with the big boys then you have fight like them.”

His trump card is that Inmarsat unlike its main competitors, is financially stable and its networks fully-funded, giving it a reliable sustainable service but he is clearly frustrated that some partisan reporting and PR spin dressed up as industry opinion has made those competitors look like a serious alternative.

Coles is aware of the risks of being over-aggressive against its detractors but he says that even the Inmarsat channel partners are growing tired of reading claims by rivals of services that can never be realised.

“We’re seeing that more and more. The people that understand the market understand what we are doing and that we can be relied upon to deliver. Our track record speaks to that and our future commitment is just the same.”

Frank Coles Interview Part 2 – the move into VSAT in context

Perhaps because it is a company that made its reputation in provision of L-Band services, Inmarsat appeared slow to spot the move towards maritime VSAT. It was not alone – I remember maritime consultants of various stripes telling me that broadband on merchant vessels would never happen, especially not the high-end VSAT services then used on cruise ships.

But move in it did – though not for reasons that are clearly recognised. The prime movers were the high-value end of the market and often regional rather than global traders.

But VSAT started to make its mark in maritime because land-focussed DPs needed to find new markets. The simplest way to do this was by offering a service that could compete with FleetBroadband, even accounting for the hardware lease costs and a contended network. These services had in some cases a slower data throughput than FB but owners were attracted by the potential of an all-you-can-eat data plan.

“That’s what allowed VSAT to gain traction and the desire for data and a fixed price service has become insatiable,” says Coles. “We took a path into this market first by buying ShipEquip with a view to developing our own bespoke VSAT network. ShipEquip gives us a ready-made base to move into VSAT.”

ShipEquip is already marketing Xpress Link, a VSAT offering with FB backup, which Coles says sets the stage for the next transition, to Global Xpress, which he claims will be ‘a game-changer,’ with throughput speeds of up to 50MB a second. The obvious question is whether Inmarsat will price GX more aggressively than its competitors?

“We will provide a value for money price because we will charge the same as the competition but provide double the throughput. The rest of market is not able to provides the speeds we can for same cost. Those owners who want significantly higher speeds and better quality will come to Global Xpress,” he says.

So much for the hype, but will he find enough takers for the service? After all the AMMITEC affair clearly demonstrated that some owners think Inmarsat-C telex is perfectly suitable for their communications needs.

“It will remain a niche product – there are a vast number of owners who are quite happy at lower end of the market and small data requirements a month,” he agrees. “There are 60-70,000 potential ships and 15-20,000 could be prepared to try VSAT”.

He says GX service will have “a smaller antenna and new technology to overcome rain fade” but there will be “a symbiotic relationship between Ka and FB. I think FB will be core maritime communications pipe for some years to come”.

His main rival here – in the PR war at least – is KVH, but he says the disadvantage of such ‘mini-VSAT’ offerings is that users rarely get level of service they are promised. As more ships are added to the network, the worse the service becomes, meaning the provider has to secure more bandwidth, pushing up their internal costs.

The first GX satellite goes up in July 2013, the second at the end of 2013 and the third,  completing the global service, in the middle of 2014, at a cool $1.5bn but Coles says even this expenditure doesn’t mean that it will start charging for GMDSS, as has been wrongly suggested elsewhere.

“We’re putting GX into the market but we are still required to provide GMDSS free of charge and there will be no charge in future. And we’ll be here tomorrow and next year and the next, which not all of our competitors can claim with any certainty.”

Inmarsat’s Frank Coles on value, competition and fiery pitchforks

To say that Inmarsat is in the spotlight at present is an understatement. Successive waves of vested commercial interest, personal opinions and a dose of righteous Greek indignation have been washing around its feet after the communications giant announced a wave of price rises effective May 1.

I took the opportunity to talk to president of Inmarsat Maritime, Frank Coles at the recent CMA Shipping 2012 event to get a clearer picture of the changes and the results will appear here in three parts. The first discusses his theme at the conference – value versus cost, while subsequent pieces will look at VSAT strategy and the taking the fight to the competition.

In fact the prices rises – like the indignation, rabble-rousing and fiery pitchforks – are not quite what they seem. The changes stem in part from a reorganisation in January this year which saw new business units formed to focus on increasing the company’s sales and marketing efforts and in targeting its competitors’ business.

Coles says the big picture is to get closer to its customers, though channel marketing, through DPs and their SPs will remain the source of the majority of revenues.

“I realise that when partners see Inmarsat calling on a customer they get nervous but over 80% of our business is still indirect and in maritime we have no desire to change that. The channel has the relationship and the regional knowledge that we don’t have,” he says.

Coles says he wants to make a break with the past by focussing not on churn (where customers hopped between DPs and SPs chasing lower rates) but on growth. And though he accepts the market timing could be better, he says Inmarsat will be able to take back customers with a better proposition by persuading them to think more about value than simply cost.

“Owners are focussing on the wrong thing when they talk just about cutting costs. At $30 a day with Inmarsat you can send 3-400MB of data and for $50 a day you can send 2-3GB. For $100 a day you get unlimited amounts of data, whether you use that data for weather routeing or fuel optimisation of virtual arrival and save yourself multiple tonnes of bunkers which cost you $750 a tonne.”

It’s a well-worn adage that cutting costs by itself doesn’t save a business money and he says the majority of Inmarsat customers are at the point where they should be realising a return on their investment in satcoms system rather than seeing it as an obstacle to profitability.

“New FleetBroadband customers are spending around $30-50 a day – more than that if you include voice and crew calling so it’s not hard to account for that in reasonable usage. Utilising the umbilical cord between ship and shore and the right tools to save money, means you can get back the investment in the communications in one day.”

Supporting his case is the evidence that the industry has followed a natural bandwidth migration path, from B to Fleet to FB, a journey that will ultimately lead to Inmarsat Ka-band VSAT. Arguments about the value of its services, versus its public service GMDSS remit and the fact that it must also operate at a profit, have been around for years but he says there are Fleet customers spending thousands of dollars a month who could save straight away by moving to FB.

If that is the case I wonder then why has he hiked the price of Fleetbroadband? Like every other punter and interested party I have read one wave after another of supposed outrage at the price increases on FBB. Turns out they are right in one sense only.

“There is no price hike. We have increased the price on pay as you go because it offers no value to anyone including ourselves. We have reduced the price of every bundle of every package of data up to 15 gigabytes. It’s a much more efficient model for us and it puts us in tune with the market.”

Prices have risen for Existing and Evolved services, (Inmarsat-B & Fleet) because of the smaller numbers of people using them despite the infrastructure that must be maintained to support them, but he says the changes here and to FB were discussed with channel partners for some time.

“The net result is that it shouldn’t be any more expensive for shipowners who are using our services day to day. Lots of customers are sitting on FB and only using it as a backup but I believe you should pay for convenience.”

Straight talk and tough love on ECDIS

I write a monthly column for BIMCO on similar subjects to those covered here. Every now and again I throw all the toys out of my pram and usually encounter a polite refusal to publish. I honestly thought the same thing would happen here but I’m pleased to say BIMCO came through and published the piece.

It’s a serious issue, caught in the crossbeams of some poor regulation, some over-zealous enforcement, tardy preparation and the shipping industry’s persistent obsession with looking the other way. No it’s more than that – it’s like Douglas Adams describes one of my favourite aliens in H2G2: “it believes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you”.

Anyway read on, ‘cos this train is pulling into the station on slightly iffy brakes…

Tough love and straight talk on ECDIS

By Neville Smith

I was as interested as anyone to read last week’s Watchkeeper “Taking ECDIS very seriously” noting real-life incidents reported by pilots where the shipboard Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) failed to perform correctly. In fact I was probably more interested than most, having just attended a series of Admiralty workshops on this subject at the biennial Sea-Japan event.

Having received assurances from Watchkeeper that he would not mind my penning a semi-riposte, there are observations to share on the ECDIS mandate process that I think need reinforcing, over and beyond the problems that he points out.

Beginning with the current issue of ECDIS anomalies, while it is clear that this is a serious issue, it is also true that no mariner on any ship should be unaware of them by now, nor that they lack the means to take corrective action.

A briefing from one ECDIS maker stressed the point that when the anomalies were first identified, it had a solution available within months. This is not a software “patch” but an upgrade that served to rectify the problem. The first anomalies were actually identified in 2010, which makes the recent fuss seem a little tardy on behalf of some owners, their flag states and their class societies too. As further issues have come to light these too have been resolved, with new software freely available for download.

While one or two ECDIS manufacturers have been singled out as offenders, there is reason to think that more than one maker shares the issue, which suggests a need for more transparency on this issue is overdue.

Conversations at Sea-Japan appeared to confirm that while many ships are fitted with ECDIS, paper charts remain the choice for primary navigation. This is perfectly legal (and will be after the SOLAS amendments come into force, incidentally) but any computer software that is not kept up to date can hardly be said to be fit for purpose.

It should hardly need saying that owners must keep charts up to date for legal ECDIS-based navigation but in addition free data services are available to ensure that the latest temporary and preliminary notices can be overlaid on ENCs.

The suggestion that some owners may be using pirated software on their ECDIS is simply beyond belief. Would they wittingly buy counterfeit spare parts with the same abandon? Some might perhaps, but ECDIS is too important to let any risk develop that the system is not performing to the required standard.

Neither should ECDIS need a period of bedding in, since it has been available since the mid-1990s. Yes, there is confusion between the unofficial version, ECS and official ECDIS, but there has been plenty of time for the industry to prepare for the change.

Comparisons heard elsewhere to the introduction of AIS, GMDSS and LRIT are spurious. The industry has had a long enough lead time to think about how ECDIS will affect its operations. Some far-sighted owners have used the time to re-shape their procedures and operations to take advantage of efficiencies it can deliver. Others have stuck their heads in the sand.

The level of feedback from earlier Admiralty seminars has been almost jaw-dropping in the basic nature of questions asked and concerns raised. To judge from these, one would not think the first mandatory carriage deadline was just months away.

Of course, for the majority of the existing fleet the deadline is some years away and the current earnings environment hardly encourages the kind of investment in time and money that ECDIS demands. But owners have to understand that moving to digital navigation is not the same as upgrading the Inmarsat. It requires a change of mind-set that many appear to baulk at, because they think it removes or replaces traditional navigation skills and increases risk.

That is a little like saying that this article would have been better written on a typewriter than a PC. Yes, loss of GPS is a risk but ECDIS still functions in DR mode if GPS signal is lost. Yes, navigation must be backed up by manual procedures, but the regulations only require navigators to use ECDIS, not be experts in the computer code that powers it.

Owners also need to understand that ECDIS operations must form part of the company’s safety management system, so the change of mind-set includes both ship and shore and means superintendents, many of whom are engineers, must think like deck officers.

The fact that training is such a big issue now is clearly a result of putting off to next year what should have been started or even completed by now. Hardly a week passes without one dire warning or another on the number of officers who need to be trained by the deadline and yes, the numbers are daunting.

There remain some dubious training institutions whose idea of education is rubber-stamping a certificate as a reward for attending a generic ECDIS training course. Increasingly though, training is improving as centres recognise the fact that attendance means nothing when the PSC inspector asks a navigator to demonstrate their competence.

Neither is computer-based training the panacea that many would like us to believe, since it often takes longer to complete and is less effective, than that which happens in a classroom.

There also needs to be recognition of the fact that when “ECDIS-assisted groundings” have occurred, the resulting investigation rarely, if ever, concludes that the equipment was actually malfunctioning – or that the crew were completely competent and adequately trained. Normally a combination of incorrect configuration and insufficient training are the cause.

If this sounds like an attack on ship owner reticence to engage then that is partially true. More than that, it is a reflection of the fact that owners have failed to grasp the magnitude of the change at hand. But they are not alone. The type approval process is in need of an upgrade, flag and port states need to understand the subject better and it would be a huge help if all equipment manufacturers interpreted the performance standard in the same way, rather than insist on making all system interfaces different.

But even so, the world turns and we will find out within months how prepared or otherwise the industry is for the change of rules. The news – also reported previously by Watchkeeper – that AMSA is treating 1 July 2012 as the effective date for mandatory carriage on all ships, will give us a clearer picture of how prepared or otherwise the industry really is for a change on this scale.

https://www.bimco.org/en/News/2012/04/25_Feature_Week_17.aspx

Inmarsat finally gets a right to reply…

Interesting to read Frank Coles, president of Inmarsat Maritime making a strong riposte to the AMMITEC letter in the latest issue of DigitalShip (http://www.thedigitalship.com/conferences/2006/news.aspl), which along with MaritimeInsight has at least provided some balance to the more numerous but far more partisan forums elsewhere.

It’s been a sobering process to watch Inmarsat’s competitors and their paid consultants thrashing away at Inmarsat as if it was some kind of maritime Aunt Sally for whom no criticism is low enough. In running AMMITEC’s complaint and Coles’ answer DigitalShip has done what no one else has so far bothered to do – set out the argument and let users make up their minds.

In fact as Coles points out, the real change in this debate is that Inmarsat has never really talked about price to this degree. As a wholesaler it traditionally left end-user pricing to its channel partners and their service providers.

That changed to some extent with the acquisition of Stratos and subsequently ShipEquip but this battle was always coming down the pipe. One of my regular questions to Inmarsat when writing on Lloyd’s List a decade ago was when they would renegotiate the LESO agreement and get in the game of selling direct.

These days the DPs have consolidated to the point where users get small variances in cost and flavour of services. SPs are probably the more agile in terms of seeking tailored packages to fit end users. Talk to them as I have recently in Singapore, Stamford and Japan and they are concerned about the effect on margins; but there is no suggestion that they think the howling inaccuracies and misleading marketing of the opposition present a viable alternative.

As already pointed out on the blog, Coles reminds readers that GMDSS is a free service, which is not the same as saying Inmarsat-C traffic is free. He also takes a dig at competitor constellations as being unable to provide the kind of uptime and service reliability demanded by IMO to support GMDSS. Rumours last week that one Inmarsat competitor was recalling a bad batch of handsets does little to erase such doubts.

Coles goes on that the price increases on E&E services are an understandable adjustment to an evolving market situation. Some owners and managers clearly think 10 year-old data speeds and service levels are OK, but would they accept the same on land? If so, we’d all still be on dial-up, but in any event, he says there are no plans, as AMMITEC claims, to retire Fleet.

Coles is pretty upfront too about the changes to FleetBroadband pricing – not just that the package prices have stayed the same or come down – and he mines a theme he’s been scraping away at since before CMA.

Inmarsat is keen to move the debate away from the negative implications of cost and towards the sunlit uplands of value. Coles argues FleetBroadband used as a back-up should cost more because the customer requires on-demand flexibility when the VSAT crashes.

“We have asked users for a $3 a day commitment” he says, an “annual fee of $1,095 equivalent to one and half tonnes of bunker fuel,” which he thinks could be claimed back many times over by better use of satcomms to power smarter shipping operations and the use of techniques such as virtual arrival and weather routeing.

There is no doubt that increasing the price of FBB as a back-up to competing VSAT systems will be unpopular among customers who are using it for just this purpose, but it hardly seems a stretch to suggest that users should pay a premium for convenience, especially when Inmarsat is offering its own VSAT stepping stone Xpress Link with FBB back-up ahead of the full Global Xpress service in due course.

He says that small customers concerned about price rises will be given the option to use a ‘small boat package’ to which they can transition and it’s probably fair to say that there will be low cost operators out there for whom the minimum required satcoms connectivity will be just about enough.

This underscores the point that has struck me repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. As Inmarsat’s detractors have lined up to take a kick, I have never once had the feeling that they had the user’s interests at heart. Instead it seemed to me they were using a sense of moral outrage as a smokescreen to sell alternative solutions.

Inmarsat may be combative in its style and certainly far from perfect, but it appears to have less to hide than its competitors, despite having a considerable amount of skin in this game. For that at least, it deserves the fair crack of the whip that DigitalShip has given it.