5 ms·

How so? I mean, besides providing better connectivity for people on ships, what will/can change? What was blocked in building out by current satellite offering

How so? I mean, besides providing better connectivity for people on ships, what will/can change? What was blocked in building out by current satellite offerings?

etrautmann 6y ago
There’s a surprising amount of real time route optimization that in theory could improve efficiency and cost by a few percent by taking current and weather into account.
- gomox 6y ago
  Weather routing is already prevalent over existing satphone connections. The GFS model that is typically used for this purpose has low enough resolution that there's marginal returns to additional bandwidth or reduced latency.
  - guywhocodes 6y ago
    You can interpolate the GFS very accurately in terms of wind over land and close to land with WRF-ARW. There is highish resolution land use data and good elevation models. This is something you can do on your laptop even these days. However I have no idea of good it is at wave and currents.
    - repsilat 6y ago
      You can also put the compute and the data on land, and do routing as a service. The decision bandwidth (i.e., ideal heading/route) is miniscule.
- mciancia 6y ago
  Well, routing seems like something that needs just ship position. You can easily send that over, for example, iridium network and as long as you won't try doing that 10 times per second (because why?) if savings were actually that big, it could already be done, even many years ago
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  You can also get real time data via ham radio although it’s extremely slow. It still works for navigation adjustments and optimizations. I fail to see how this is relevant beyond crew morale.
mschuster91 6y ago
Tracking the status of your cargo. At the moment you always have uncertainity during the voyage - you don't know if e.g. temperature was held consistently until you took control of the cargo after arrival, or if it was tampered with during transit in any way. For fleet owners, no matter if for ships, cars/trucks or planes, management becomes way easier if they have global high bandwidth data uplink: you can detect stuff like engine or other part wear early by running big data analysis on telemetry, and in disaster case you have way better logs to operate on (both post mortem and during troubleshooting). This by the way also is relevant for car manufacturers - with the exception of Tesla, the only way classic car manufacturers get information on how their cars are used in the real world comes from test drivers, accident reports and shop visits. Consistent data uplinks allow for a lot more telemetry that can be used to improve their products. Surprisingly, even scientists can benefit from this - have ships transmit real-time data about air pressure, sunlight, wave height etc. and suddenly you have a global network of floating data buoys.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Consistent data uplinks allow for a lot more telemetry that can be used to improve their products. Shipping is one thing -- the company still owns the goods. But keep this out of my cars.
  - sedgjh23 6y ago
    I’m curious, why?
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      Because that data can be seized by cops or mined by secret services.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  > temperature was held consistently until you took control of the cargo after arrival, or if it was tampered with during transit in any way. There are already temperature and tamper devices for sensitive freight. There are devices that will show if orientation has changed or if shock occurred etc. Sensitive freight is an entire industry that has already innovated around the lack of connectivity. That's not to say there isn't further innovation to be made.
gkfasdfasdf 6y ago
On cruise lines at least, internet is extremely expensive and slow. Like $80/gb. Starlink would be awesome (Assuming it will be safe to go on cruises in the future...).
- ryanlol 6y ago
  > Assuming it will be safe to go on cruises in the future... Why wouldn’t it be?
  - hddu 6y ago
    New (covid) world order
  - rlt 6y ago
    Same COVID obsession that leads to people wearing masks during their wedding ceremony, etc.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  You could live on cruise ships 11 months out of the year...
alwayshumans 6y ago
Most vessels will have some form of connectivity on board right now. It depends on their vicinity to coast. Right now data sizes of an email are industry standard. As you go into 100s of Mb you start to see people really struggle. I would look at BIM systems for a parallel with ships. Ships are incredibly complicated and often self reliant. Shore based monitoring is hated by the crew but vessel operators see return from it. A simple example would be an extension of the IoT devices already on board probably around engines. Anything with tangible benefits to Efficiency and safety would see investment.

How so? I mean, besides providing better connectivity for people on ships, what will/can change? What was blocked in building out by current satellite offerings?

etrautmann 6y ago

There’s a surprising amount of real time route optimization that in theory could improve efficiency and cost by a few percent by taking current and weather into account.

gomox 6y ago
Weather routing is already prevalent over existing satphone connections. The GFS model that is typically used for this purpose has low enough resolution that there's marginal returns to additional bandwidth or reduced latency.
- guywhocodes 6y ago
  You can interpolate the GFS very accurately in terms of wind over land and close to land with WRF-ARW. There is highish resolution land use data and good elevation models. This is something you can do on your laptop even these days. However I have no idea of good it is at wave and currents.
  - repsilat 6y ago
    You can also put the compute and the data on land, and do routing as a service. The decision bandwidth (i.e., ideal heading/route) is miniscule.
mciancia 6y ago
Well, routing seems like something that needs just ship position. You can easily send that over, for example, iridium network and as long as you won't try doing that 10 times per second (because why?) if savings were actually that big, it could already be done, even many years ago
dkdk8283 6y ago
You can also get real time data via ham radio although it’s extremely slow. It still works for navigation adjustments and optimizations. I fail to see how this is relevant beyond crew morale.

mschuster91 6y ago

Tracking the status of your cargo. At the moment you always have uncertainity during the voyage - you don't know if e.g. temperature was held consistently until you took control of the cargo after arrival, or if it was tampered with during transit in any way. For fleet owners, no matter if for ships, cars/trucks or planes, management becomes way easier if they have global high bandwidth data uplink: you can detect stuff like engine or other part wear early by running big data analysis on telemetry, and in disaster case you have way better logs to operate on (both post mortem and during troubleshooting). This by the way also is relevant for car manufacturers - with the exception of Tesla, the only way classic car manufacturers get information on how their cars are used in the real world comes from test drivers, accident reports and shop visits. Consistent data uplinks allow for a lot more telemetry that can be used to improve their products. Surprisingly, even scientists can benefit from this - have ships transmit real-time data about air pressure, sunlight, wave height etc. and suddenly you have a global network of floating data buoys.

nitrogen 6y ago
Consistent data uplinks allow for a lot more telemetry that can be used to improve their products. Shipping is one thing -- the company still owns the goods. But keep this out of my cars.
- sedgjh23 6y ago
  I’m curious, why?
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Because that data can be seized by cops or mined by secret services.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
> temperature was held consistently until you took control of the cargo after arrival, or if it was tampered with during transit in any way. There are already temperature and tamper devices for sensitive freight. There are devices that will show if orientation has changed or if shock occurred etc. Sensitive freight is an entire industry that has already innovated around the lack of connectivity. That's not to say there isn't further innovation to be made.

gkfasdfasdf 6y ago

On cruise lines at least, internet is extremely expensive and slow. Like $80/gb. Starlink would be awesome (Assuming it will be safe to go on cruises in the future...).

ryanlol 6y ago
> Assuming it will be safe to go on cruises in the future... Why wouldn’t it be?
- hddu 6y ago
  New (covid) world order
- rlt 6y ago
  Same COVID obsession that leads to people wearing masks during their wedding ceremony, etc.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
You could live on cruise ships 11 months out of the year...

alwayshumans 6y ago

Most vessels will have some form of connectivity on board right now. It depends on their vicinity to coast. Right now data sizes of an email are industry standard. As you go into 100s of Mb you start to see people really struggle. I would look at BIM systems for a parallel with ships. Ships are incredibly complicated and often self reliant. Shore based monitoring is hated by the crew but vessel operators see return from it. A simple example would be an extension of the IoT devices already on board probably around engines. Anything with tangible benefits to Efficiency and safety would see investment.