Torm Shipping chooses VSAT for entire fleet - Digital Ship

SATCOMS
A
s part of the final push to bring full
global coverage for its high-speed
FleetBroadband service, Inmarsat
has planned a repositioning schedule for its
constellation of Inmarsat-4 (I-4) satellites
that aims to close the current hole over the
Pacific Ocean and optimise the network
going forward over the next decade.
The repositioning programme will also
necessitate service outages for users of
FleetBroadband in certain regions of the
world for up to 25 days, as coverage disappears
while the spacecraft travel to their
new homes.
While this may be inconvenient for
some broadband users, Inmarsat says
that the measure is a necessary result of
the evolution of the broadband family of
products (including land mobile BGAN
and SwiftBroadband aeronautical services),
and is designed to improve performance
for all users once complete.
"The whole I-4 portfolio business case
has changed dramatically from the time we
decided to build the satellites," explains
Richard Denny, Inmarsat's vice president,
satellite and network operations. "It's a situation
that's been evolving for eight years
now. We signed the contract to build the
satellites in 2000 and at that time
FleetBroadband wasn't even intended."
"BGAN was originally designed to be a
land product, and we built three satellites
in case one didn't make it up there, as you
can cover 86 per cent of the world’s land
mass and 98 per cent of the population
with two satellites in their current location.
But once the programme got underway
we saw that there were all sorts of
opportunities to develop these capabilities
in the maritime and aeronautical sectors,
which weren't in the original plan."
Inmarsat satellite repositioning
In preparation for global coverage of FleetBroadband in 2009, Inmarsat is about to embark on a satellite
repositioning programme that will involve service outages in different regions during January and February.
Digital Ship spoke to Richard Denny and Piers Cunningham, Inmarsat, to find out more
"To do that, firstly we'd need three
satellites, so we needed two successful
launches for the first two. After that happened
it meant a whole new way of thinking,
developing the FleetBroadband and
SwiftBroadband services, and optimising
the network on a global basis for these
products. The repositioning is one of the
elements that came out of the whole
review of these capabilities."
With the three-satellite fully-global network
a possibility following the successful
launch of the third satellite in August of
this year, Inmarsat then began to look at
how to organise the new constellation to
achieve maximum performance for all
users, on land and at sea.
"(Repositioning) gives us benefits on
the whole portfolio of the I-4 satellites,"
explained Mr Denny. "Land is at the heart
of it, but there are benefits for the other
services, like FleetBroadband."
"We can achieve a better global optimisation
of all of our satellites because of the
way that the spectrum gets utilised
around the world, so we can actually have
increasing capacity as a result of this. That
will benefit the maritime sector, they will
have more capacity in the future."
"One of the problems we have for land at
the moment is that mountain ranges and so
on can get in the way, as people at the edge
of coverage tend to be at a lower elevation.
FleetBroadband already has the advantage
that ships on the oceans don't have anything
in the way in terms of visibility to the satellite,
so that doesn't really affect maritime,
but this will also allow us to optimise the
total broadband portfolio for the end users."
Mr Denny is keen to point out that the
company has not taken the decision to
move these satellites, and the subsequent
Digital Ship December 2008 page 12
service outages, lightly, and is convinced
that the benefits will be worth the effort.
"When we first mooted the idea of
repositioning the I-4s the automatic
response was 'why do you want to do
that?', but there were historical reasons for
positioning the satellites where they were
in 2005, and in 2008 we have a whole different
way of looking at the global delivery
of broadband services. It's been very
much an evolutionary process," he said.
Piers Cunningham, head of maritime at
Inmarsat, notes that the evolving nature of
the industry over the past few years has
necessitated this acceleration in plans for a
maritime broadband service, which were
barely conceived when the development
of these I-4 satellites first began.
"At that point we hadn't even launched
Fleet into the market, so it shows what
kind of crystal ball you need, in the market,"
he told us.
"The maritime terminals are unaffected
by the relocation of the satellites, they're
type approved down to the edge of coverage
so whether the satellite is over land or
the oceanic areas, to a maritime terminal it
makes no difference at all. But optimising
the overall architecture is important, the
whole idea is that it will benefit everyone."
Schedule
Getting to grips with the Inmarsat schedule
for the repositioning takes a little patience,
and a good memory for codes and acronyms.
The key elements are the I-4, or
Inmarsat-4, satellites. The I-4s are Inmarsat's
latest generation of technology, and have
joined the Inmarsat-3 (I-3) and Inmarsat 2 (I-
2) generations in orbit above the Earth. The
I-4s are the satellites that are required to
operate the FleetBroadband network.
A FleetBroadband service outage will occur in the red shaded area from January 7 2009, for 25 days
Three I-4 satellites are now circling the
planet, with Flight 1 (F1) launched in
March 2005, Flight 2 (F2) launched in
November 2005, and Flight 3 (F3) entering
orbit in August of 2008.
The I-4 F1 and the I-4 F2 have been carrying
FleetBroadband traffic within their
own footprints since the service was
launched in November 2007, and will,
after repositioning, be joined by the I-4 F3
to offer global coverage for the first time.
These satellites have also been utilised, to
a small extent, by existing legacy services,
such as Fleet and mini-M.
The planned repositioning will also mean
a re-definition of the traditional Inmarsat
ocean regions covered by the three satellites.
Currently, the two active I-4 satellites
are the I-4 F1 in the Indian Ocean Region
(IOR) and the I-4 F2 in the Atlantic Ocean
Region West (AOR-W), with I-4 F3 having
recently been launched and completed
testing before being situated above the
Americas at 98°W.
Following repositioning, I-4 F1 will
henceforth offer coverage over the Asia-
Pacific region (ASIA-PAC), I-4 F2 will cover
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA),
and the I-4 F3 will remain positioned over
North and South America, covering their
surrounding oceans (AMERICAS).
It is in this shift in regions that service
gaps will appear, starting in January 2009,
Mr Denny explains.
"On the seventh of January we'll be
transferring all of the E&E (existing and
evolved) services, things like Fleet 77, 55
and 33, mini-M, these types of services.
They'll all be coming off the I-4 (F2) and
going onto I-3 F4 (one of Inmarsat's previous-generation
satellites)," he told us.
"Once we've got all of the traffic off the
satellite we start it on its way, and this is
when we'll have the first service outage, to
take it (I-4 F2) to its new home over EMEA."
All FleetBroadband traffic, which cannot
be carried by the I-3 generation of satellites,
will be moved onto I-4 F3 (AMERICAS) -
which is situated to the west of I-4 F2, thus
leaving a coverage gap over the westernmost
part of Africa, and areas of the
Atlantic from north to south including
Ireland, Iceland and north-western UK (see
red shaded area in diagram, left).
"At that point of time the I-4 F3 satellite
will be providing BGAN and
FleetBroadband services, and the IOR (I-4
F1) will be running as it is at the moment,"
said Mr Denny.
"From the current coverage provided by
the AOR-West satellite, the only area that will
lose coverage is the red shaded area (previous
page), while we're moving the satellite to
its new home. That area will go without
FleetBroadband coverage for about 25 days,
starting from the seventh of January."
As soon as the first satellite has been successfully
repositioned Inmarsat will then
begin its second scheduled relocation, and
the final part in the network jigsaw.
"The next outage occurs from the sixth