The connectivity challenge at sea
Unlike a building ashore, a moving vessel has no fixed line. Coverage changes with location and weather, links can drop for minutes or hours, and every megabyte over satellite has a cost. Any system that depends on the ship being online will fail; systems that expect intermittent links succeed.
Satellite layers: LEO, MEO and GEO
Low-Earth-orbit constellations (such as Starlink and OneWeb) deliver high speed and low latency, making cloud-style work practical at sea. Medium-Earth-orbit services add fibre-like regional capacity, while geostationary VSAT in Ku-, Ka- and C-band has been the long-standing workhorse with wide, predictable coverage but higher latency.
L-band and safety communications
L-band mobile satellite services (Inmarsat FleetBroadband and Fleet Xpress, Iridium Certus) trade raw speed for compact antennas and high reliability — the link that keeps working when others do not. They also underpin GMDSS, the mandatory global maritime distress and safety system.
Building a resilient hybrid network
The current best practice is a layered network: a fast LEO link as primary, GEO/VSAT or L-band as backup, cellular near shore, and automatic failover between them. The design goal is graceful degradation — the most important data still gets through when the best link is gone.