KVH executive vice president discusses demand for broadband on commercial vessels

MIDDLETOWN – Brent Bruun, executive vice president of mobile broadband at KVH Industries Inc., recently spoke at the CMA Shipping 2015 conference in Stamford, Conn., where he was part of an expert panel that addressed the impact of “big data” on maritime operations.
Bruun said advances are being seen in areas such as engine monitoring, remote maintenance, satellite delivery of electronic charts, weather data and e-Learning services.
Bruun said the advances are being made even though the industry is fighting to reduce crew turnover and improve training. Attracting and retaining a quality crew, one that is being asked to work on increasingly sophisticated equipment, under increasingly complex regulatory expectations, remains a major challenge, he said at the conference.
In addition, he said that today’s seafarers demand better connections to their homes – access to the Internet and social media while at sea, in addition to access to news, movies, television shows and music, “all of which must be licensed,” Bruun said.
“The shipping industry needs to change how it thinks about connectivity and content delivery,” he said.
Services for data access at sea need to address demand and the threat that a crew’s broadband data usage could overwhelm a vessel’s data network.
“Simply adding bandwidth capacity and data speed is not enough as there are always new ways to fill up that capacity,” he said.
Bruun said there is a growing trend toward the use of multicasting, where one transmission sends files to all vessels. These are cached on an onboard server for immediate access.
“KVH’s IP-MobileCast content delivery service is designed so it never affects the quality of, or competes with, an owner’s Internet or VoIP service. Beam capacity is sized for peak loads, leaving about half the network capacity unused. Multicast data is transmitted in unused bandwidth, at a lower priority than standard IP traffic and it does not use the vessel’s or customer’s mini-VSAT Broadbandsm plan’s data allotment,” he said. “A multicast approach like IP-MobileCast sharply reduces the crew’s demand for bandwidth.”