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 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.