Cruise & Ferry Review - Autumn/Winter 2020

safety. We have had ships on secondary communications for six months at no additional charge and we are happy to provide that level of service.” Inmarsat guarantees backup capacity with all of its solutions. “In an emergency scenario, passenger traffic would probably be stopped to protect operations and billing. Billing needs to be a separate pipe, one that will fall over to the backup service, so you’ve got resilience.” Ferry operations benefit from the Fleet Data service, which can pull data from the ship’s Voyage Data Recorder or other systems and put it in the cloud. Previously, says Broadhurst, when an operator wanted to track data and assets, “they had to get on the ship each time. We put it all in the cloud, so there is no need to go on the ship. We can do it once and then share it.” Some companies that work with ferry operators are accustomed to taking data direct from the ship – for example, from the engine. Broadhurst says that there have been no problems convincing these companies of the advantages of taking it from the cloud instead. “There is no reason they can’t have dedicated bandwidth through a service we call Fleet Connect, or a pipe going into the cloud and then interface with applications from the specialists. Once in the cloud, they can have different dashboards if they want. They can use all the data in different ways.” Broadhurst believes the rapid shift in requirements driven by the Covid-19 crisis has drawn attention to an underlying weakness in many operators’ investment strategies. To address this, Inmarsat is committed to providing next-generation connectivity for operators, with Broadhurst drawing attention to the Fleet Hotspot developed via Fleet Xpress as exemplary. “We are solving a lot of problems by facilitating a digital revolution,” he says. If any business can say that with confidence, it’s Inmarsat. Having been in operation for four decades, the company has outlived many of its competitors. “For a technology company to be 40 years old is unusual,” says Broadhurst. “We believe that Inmarsat has got a strong future.” CFR Inmarsat has its own satellites so can offer service flexibility that is out of reach for many other providers 1 1 3