KVH Industries has introduced a regional version of its global AgilePlans connectivity-as-a-service VSAT
Owners of smaller vessels, such as tugs and workboats, that do not have space for a 1-m or 60-cm diameter VSAT antenna can achieve faster bandwidth by installing KVH’s 37-cm diameter antenna to connect to high throughput satellites (HTS).
Vessel operators will be able to use bandwidth of up to 5 Mbps on the downlink from the satellite and 2 Mbps on the uplink by using KVH’s TracPhone V3-HTS antenna and AgilePlans Regional service.
KVH executive vice president for mobile connectivity Mark Woodhead said this service would be ideal for fishing vessels, tugs, workboats and smaller commercial vessels to leverage fast and reliable internet connectivity. This is a huge potential market for VSAT.
“There are more than 350,000 fishing vessels that are over 12 m in length and the vast majority of these vessels have no ability to connect once out of sight of land,” said Mr Woodhead.
“We intend to change that with this new offering,” he said.
AgilePlans will link to HTS Ku-band and wide-beam satellites in four regions. There is coverage over North America and the Caribbean, South America, western Europe and Africa, and Asia Pacific.
“As the pace of maritime digitalisation accelerates, we wanted to ensure that smaller commercial vessels could take advantage of the all-inclusive, no-commitment AgilePlans offering, which has proven so successful for commercial fleets worldwide,” said Mr Woodhead.
Vessel operators can use faster connectivity to take advantage of real-time data transfers to improve decision making for fuel optimisation, route planning, to support cloud-based software programs, remote system monitoring and data analytics.
AgilePlans Global service is paired with the 60-cm diameter TracPhone V7-HTS, with data speeds as high as 10 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. For higher bandwidth, vessel owners can use AgilePlans with a TracPhone V11-HTS, with diameter of 1 m, to obtain data speeds as high as 20 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up to the satellite.
This TracPhone HTS series was designed for KVH’s mini-VSAT Broadband HTS network that uses Intelsat’s FlexMaritime service to deliver multi-layered coverage. This enables vessels to use multiple HTS spot beams and wide-beam satellites for maximum availability of broadband service.
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