FlexMartime Vantage: Faster, More Resilient Connectivity at Sea Without the Cost and Complexity

In today’s maritime digital age, fleet owners and operators can never have enough high-quality, robust connectivity.

Connectivity is critical for enhancing the efficiency of operations, increasing safety, and optimizing routing and fuel consumption. Reliable and resilient connectivity is needed to manage logistics, coordinate with port authorities, and capture and share ship performance data that can preempt major mechanical issues. Connectivity is also crucial for crew welfare, enabling employees to remain connected with loved ones and access entertainment during long periods of isolation at sea.

Many commercial ships today are equipped with VSAT antennas that connect to geostationary networks to deliver satellite-powered connectivity. SES’s FlexMaritime Velocity is one of these solutions, providing reliable, trusted, and globally available connectivity from GEO satellites. However, given the distance of the GEO satellites from Earth, it is not always suitable for certain applications requiring superior speeds and lower latency.

The High Price of Connectivity Performance

To compensate, fleet owners have begun to deploy low Earth orbit (LEO) services from Non-Geostationary Orbit (NGSO) providers alongside their GEO solutions. In doing so, they gain access to the bandwidth needed to perform speed and latency-sensitive activities like transferring large data files or streaming video in real time with no lagging or disruption, to name a few.

But adopting and deploying an NGSO service is a costly proposition for ship owners already paying for GEO while also absorbing high fuel costs and rising operational expenses. It means investing in additional antennas and hardware and managing two disparate satellite networks from different providers.

Once installed, the cost of the service itself can quickly become prohibitive with high usage forcing ship owners to either purchase additional blocks of gigabytes or wait until the following month’s renewal.

A New, Affordable Path to High-Performing Connectivity at Sea

Operators of commercial ships equipped with SES’s FlexMaritime Velocity solution now have a new cost-effective option to bridge the gap between GEO and LEO and access superior speed and greater budgetary control.

FlexMaritime Vantage brings together two powerful satellite networks using the singular VSAT antenna already installed on the vessel to offer maritime fleets a multi-network higher-throughput connectivity experience.

By simply adding a modem and a satellite network arbitration switch, ship owners and operators can now have NGSO-like speed with minimal hardware commitments and at low gigabyte pricing.  Automatic switching intelligently routes traffic to the best available network based on availability, performance, and location, ensuring continuous connectivity, optimized network efficiency, and maximum redundancy. And unlike typical NGSO pricing arrangements, Vantage capacity can be purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Robust Connectivity on Display

In a demonstration of the practical benefits of Vantage, a commercial ship configured with access to the hybrid multi-network solution navigated challenging routes across the Atlantic using connectivity from Vantage along the way. During the journey, connectivity speeds consistently reached between 40 and 60 Mbps 80% of the time, while the standard VSAT network remained available 100% of the time.

As commercial shipping becomes increasingly data-driven and digitally connected, FlexMaritime Vantage delivers higher speeds, greater reliability, and more efficient bandwidth usage, while enabling ship owners to unlock the full potential of existing VSAT investments. By intelligently combining the strengths of multiple networks, maritime operators that deploy Vantage can enhance operations, improve crew welfare, and exert greater control over connectivity costs, all while ensuring vessels and people remain connected on the seas at all times.