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We want to give a big welcome to a new gCaptain blog sponsor KVH. Here’s basic information from KVH on their impressive technology: [Continue Reading →]

Our friends at Panbo bring us a sneak peek at KVH’s ultra small broadband satellite antenna for ships. They write:

Yup, at not much bigger than a Halloween goody bucket, the new TracVision M1 means upstart Intellian’s “world’s smallest in-motion marine satellite TV antenna” claim didn’t go unchallenged for very long. As to which one really is the smallest, that seems to depend on how you evaluate weight versus size. The M1, for instance, is only 7.5 pounds and can purportedly install on a conventional VHF antenna mount. The M1 also comes with KVH’s combo 12v controller/Direct TV receiver, which should make for a compact and easy install, but if you want HD channels, Intellian’s i1 let’s you use a Dish or ExpressVu receiver that can. The same goes for King Control’s new model of the VuQube, the fully stabilized 4000, also introduced at this show. Of course none of these sat TV systems have accumulated much user time, and it’s not easy to stay locked on a satellite with a small dish in a bouncing boat.

You can read the full story including photos of the new Iridium handsets HERE. Also keep your eyes out for the new KVH Tracphone equipment which promises to bring unmetered and low priced (well at least relatively) internet bandwidth connections to the bridge of your ship.

We have some exciting news from the team at KVH Industries. Here’s a clip from their press release:

Taking a major step toward expanding availability of the mini-VSAT Broadband service, KVH Industries, Inc., (Nasdaq: KVHI) today announced that it has signed a 5-year agreement with GE International Holdings, Inc., (also known as SAT-GE) to lease satellite capacity on its GE-23 satellite to provide coverage in the Pacific Ocean via the satellite’s North Pacific Ku-band Beam. Expected to go live in December 2008, the new coverage area will include Alaska, the west coasts of Canada and the United States, Hawaii and extend into Asia. It represents a significant expansion in the availability of the increasingly popular mini-VSAT Broadband Internet and voice service as well as the latest milestone in the KVH and ViaSat joint effort to provide affordable mobile broadband connections around the globe.

“The extension of mini-VSAT Broadband coverage into the Pacific will allow us to support a significant portion of the world’s shipping lanes, including blue water coverage between Asia and ports in the U.S. and Canada,” said Martin Kits van Heyningen, KVH’s chief executive officer.

VSAT is the technology that allowed our founder, John Konrad, to start this site while still shipping. While he was based in the Gulf Of Mexico his drillship utilized this technology to offer wireless internet in the accommodations of his ship. This worked because the vessel had a long term contract within the footprint of a VSAT provider. Ships operating internationally have been less fortunate relying on INMARSAT to relay basic email due to the prohibitively high expense for purchasing the satellite receivers and paying for bandwidth on a metered rate plan. [Continue Reading →]

We don’t usually publish press releases on gCaptain but we can’t help to be excited by new solutions for offering “High” Speed internet at sea. Marine Norway points us to this:

The introduction of FleetBroadband has pushed high-speed internet into the
marine mainstream, however, the pricing per megabyte of data puts the full
benefits of broadband usage out of reach of many vessels. Wired Ocean can
reduce the costs per megabyte of shore-to-ship FleetBroadband data to
approximately 10% by channelling the downlink through a vessel’s satellite TV
antenna. 

When used in conjunction with FleetBroadband, the Wired Ocean SBS brings with
it a tangible increase in downlink speed - a Wired Ocean downlink can be almost
twice the speed of a standard FB250 downlink without the Wired Ocean SBS
integrated. This makes the system ideal for high volume applications such as
internet browsing, downloading email with attachments, obtaining electronic
manuals and weather and navigation data for bridge and critical systems. Continue Reading…

Submarine cables world map. Click here for full-size version (Graphic: Telegeography.com)

Sea-Fever’s Peter Mello submitted the following story to our Maritime News Discoverer;

A flotilla of ships may have been dispatched to reinstate the broken submarine cable that has left the Middle East and India struggling to communicate with the rest of the world, but it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions.

According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday. Since then phone and internet traffic has been severely reduced across a huge swath of the region, slashed by as much as 70% in countries including India, Egypt and Dubai.

While tens of millions have been directly affected, the impact of the blackout has spread far wider, with economies across Asia and the Middle East struggling to cope. Governments have also become directly involved, with the Egyptian communications ministry imploring surfers to stay offline so business traffic can take priority. “People who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do,” said ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur. Continue Reading At The Guardian…

Chart Of The Cable

Graph Of Affected Areas

(Source: Renesys)

UPDATE: 2nd Cable Reported Cut

The BBC Tells Us:

The first cable - the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) - was cut at 0800 on 30 January, the firm said.

INSIDE A SUBMARINE CABLE 1 Polyethylene cover 2,4 Stranded steel armour wires 3,5 Tar-soaked nylon yarn 6 Polycarbonate insulator 7 Copper sheath 8 Protective core 9 Optical fibres Not to scale

A second cable thought to lie alongside it - SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable - was also split.

FLAG is a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East.

SEA-ME-WE 4 is a submarine cable linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.

The two cable cuts meant that the only cable in service connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt was the older Sea-M-We 3 system, according to research firm TeleGeography.

The firm said the cuts reduced the amount of available capacity on the stretch of network between India and Europe by 75% percent.

As a result, carriers in Egypt and the Middle East re-routed their European traffic around the globe, through South East Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Continue Reading…

Related Links:

• Study on Subsea Cable Cuts
  
• Live Internet Status Report
• How To Fix An Undersea Cable

UPDATE 2:

The AP is reporting: Ships did not cut internet cable