The cost of Internet broadband access on land has dropped like a lead line, but seafarers are still being charged a fortune via satellite. Peter O’Neill looks at some ‘offers’ and also proposes some simple solutions to get your costs down.
It looked like the European Space Agency (ESA) had finally done well for ‘smaller’ fishing operations: “Low-cost Internet access at sea”. It took World Fishing some time to spot ‘lower’ cost in the small print.
The fact is, providers are still charging what they can squeeze out of you, rather than a fair price for a reasonable product.
The ESA-backed experiment provider, which shall remain nameless as we could not test their system, argued to World Fishing that they were up to 70 per cent cheaper than the ‘going’ rate. That did not, however, make them ‘low-cost’ or cheap.
ESA says the going rate at sea is €20 for one megabyte at what it says is a ‘very low, from 600 bps to 64 kbps, with around 10 kbps being a typical speed”.
Most French households today can get on-land broadband running at 10Megbaytes per second for €30 unlimited use per month – and that includes multiple users in one house for video downloads (€1.5 to €2 per film), Internet, live TV and ‘free’ phone calls to most of the world.
The ESA-backed service says it offers a hybrid solution using Ku-band satellites for the downlink and narrow L-band satellites for the return channel. But the upload speed is still only maybe at the old fax speed of 9.6 kilobytes per second on Globalstar (up to 64kbps for Inmarsat) and 512 kbps to receive.
The provider was ‘cheaper’ but their services are targeting vessels which catch many tens of thousands of Euros worth of fish each trip. Connectivity charges were seen as a necessary but ‘small’ part of their earnings. Yes, the provider says they are much less than the multi-national providers. The other marketing points which are usually put up for higher prices are that you pay for good connections which do not conk out and are ‘secure’ and someone else handles technical problems.
Free information
It is no good hearing about all that useful free Web information out there if you cannot afford to log on. There is a lot of it. The ESA (www.esa.int) offers algal bloom sightings now so you can avoid working those toxic areas (see ‘Algal toxins poison Chile’s export earnings’, World Fishing, July 2006). The new ESA MetOp satellite should be up in October. It will improve weather prediction and deliver data on sea-surface temperatures (in cloud-free conditions) – very important as fish head off for warmer or cooler water.
The FAO and EU Commission expect to roll out their Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) in 2008. It will include interactive maps so you can see whether cold stores and auction house are still standing at your favourite landing port after a hurricane.
Brussels is a champion of free public data. GMES is a case where skippers will be less dependent on high-cost chart packages developed by companies who collected the (often free) data and sold it as a software package. So seafarers may also find common interest with landlubber campaigns against charges for data developed with taxpayers’ money.
GMES, FAO says, “will be of great value throughout the developing world … by providing and disseminating high-quality data sets of road networks, ports and airstrips…”.
Fish & pigs
And now for some DIY. Any skipper who can fix a snapped steel rope in a gale with a trawl stuck on the bottom can develop cheaper communications.
There are certain basic strategies. Keep it simple. Remember to use VHF whenever possible - it costs nothing. Second, piggyback your fishing needs with a friend (or a competitor if you use encryption). The technical question is about ‘line of sight - “How far can I see?” A signal containing data (a voice packet too) has to take into account the sea as it curves downwards beyond the horizon. (There are some ‘scatter’ tricks to increase that distance and they are easy to find out about).
If you can see another vessel with your own eyes you can send data to it direct. The higher you are in the crow’s next, or the top of your transmit/receive mast is above the water, the further you can both ‘see’. Let’s assume you can see 40 nautical miles from the top of the mast. Steaming at 10 knots that gives you say five hours before you tie up at the dock. Long before landing you could use WiFi (wireless fidelity) to reach a laptop ‘hot spot’ at the Fishbucks café where all the buyers and sellers agents meet next to the Profithead port auction hall.
You don’t need to race to port. Without spending a penny on satellite you could have sent an encrypted message with a video (WiFi can run comfortably at 10mbps) showing the fish in your hold. You already checked current prices on the auction website. Now you can do a direct deal with only the agent and buyer knowing and you are not even in port. You can also ‘show’ those half dozen giant monkfish to your favourite London restaurant chef and do a cash deal, either by email or a two-way Voice Over Internet Phone (VOIP) call with a cheap off-the-shelf webcam.
Your own network
What if you are more than 40 miles away and ‘dependent’ on high-charge satellite? Nema problema, as the once-ignored El Nino small fishermen would say. Relay your information (keep it private with free, Pretty Good Privacy software — http://www.pgpi.org/) by piggybacking from ship to ship.
This is not new. In the late 90s Indian telecom scientists were discussing putting a radio on top of each interstate bus to set up an ‘ad hoc’ network linked at cities en route to the Net. The buses follow each other along the same roads at the same time day and night. They would ‘talk to each other’ and also be able to send and receive signals for the Internet — sideways to and from rural villages each side of the Grand Trunk Road.
A group of airlines have exactly the same project today to connect their planes on scheduled flights.
Coastal vessels can easily set up their own ad hoc network with the vessel nearest shore making the Internet land link. Then, the North Sea, Atlantic, Baltic or Pacific has enough vessels at any one time (including freighters and cruise ships) to piggyback data.
For ideas on running ad hoc networks, start with wire.less.dk which has a good ‘social profit’ reputation. It is part of http://www.wsfii.org, a movement which has seen rich Danes get free phone calls and TV on-demand over WiFi from Copenhagen up to Helsingor….get data-trawling!
