Top quality crew onboard offshore vessels and Oil & Gas installations demand require top communications capabilities. Magne Remøy, regional director at Marlink explains how owners and operators can keep crews happy and costs down
In an ever-connected and on-line business world it is often hard to imagine how we ever managed without instant messaging, round the clock communication and the constant reassurance continuous connectivity brings.
One of the few environments it remains impossible to run a fibre connection to are the complex and invariably mobile offices and temporary homes which exist aboard the oil and gas industry’s fleet of vessels and offshore installations.
Whilst satellite connectivity has been around for decades, its cost was traditionally too high to bear for non-mission critical purposes, and live-aboard crew and visiting offshore engineers and technicians were long denied access to the precious and expensive bandwidth owners had available.
That, however, is a picture from the past, according to Magne Remøy, regional director for Marlink.
“I believe the business is in an exciting era. Across the board, but particularly in the Oil & Gas business, I would say all ships are looking at increasing their communications capabilities in the future.”
GSM today is also now getting close to the communication costs of a VSAT today. Small supply vessels here in the Gulf have traditionally gone on GSM and that’s it. Now a small VSAT can give great additional services to the crew and the cost is quite bearable for owners,” he says.
Remøy explains that whether it’s a fleet of cutting-edge seismic vessels, offshore platforms or maritime transport vessels, Sealink customised VSAT enables Marlink to develop connectivity services to meet the exact customer requirements.
In the case of one local repeat customer, the connectivity has been customized to support the company’s specific operations and crew welfare, he enthuses.
“Crew welfare remains a major driver for this. People want access to e-mail accounts, banking services, even social media on tap. Staying in touch with family anywhere in the world is naturally a big driver as well.”
Remøy explains that Marlink can provide oweners with off the shelf as well as a fully customised suite of products which range from unlimited VSAT, right through to bundles and packages of data.
“We have hardware onboard, called an exchange box, which completely controls the usage of the bandwidth by the crew. This is important because each crew member can be allocated an amount of bandwidth, after which he can simply pay for more. It’s totally manageable from the owners perspective, and there are no nasty surprises.”
Crucially, this means that owners and operators which have traditionally been keen to keep communication costs very low, can now install and operate VSAT in an affordable and fully managed way.
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Many years ago shuttle tankers in the North Sea wanted VSAT onboard for vessels undertaking critical operations. Shuttle tankers have very strict rules to follow, and alerts would be triggered if vessels strayed from predefined paramaters, in terms of closeness to the buoys.
Remøy says that around 2000-2001 the market attitude to providing this kind of connectivity really changed. Larger vessel management systems became capable of transmitting data for remote diagnostics. These vessels then became connected right to the point where individual thrusters were being managed remotely.
“A large oil tanker could generate up to 20,000 alerts per day, so while of course there is competence on board, having server systems filtering out which alerts are the most important and require human attention on a priority basis is very useful from a safety perspective,” he explains.
Moving on from that, Remøy says, right now a trend is forming amongst seismic fleet operators, who want the capability to upload live seismic data acquired out in the sea.
“These vessels tend to be looking at larger and larger packets for their monthly data management. Obviously you need a lot of bandwidth for that, but also a set of quite intelligent tools which will strip out some aspects of the seismic data and then rebuild it on land.”
More fertile ground for Marlink and its satellite operator partners are the deepwater operations, which are gaining more and more business as a combination of better technology and a sustained high oil price drive oil companies into previously unchartered territory.
He says that for FPSOs and drilling vessels, Marlink works closely with the owner to ensure dedicated bandwidth packets, with multiple antennas to ensure connectivity is constant and uninterrupted.
Today though, he stresses that crew welfare is a big driver. “Good crews won’t work on vessels without it these days.”
All of these ingredients of course ensure a healthy market for Marlink. “We are certainly busy, and In addition to providing more bandwidth to clients, the business is also growing in the sense we are winning more clients too. We are the world’s largest provider to maritime VSAT today too.
