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Superyacht is a home away from home for the rich it's a way to get away from it all every
possible luxury has been thought of the best designers the best builders the best technology
the best materials best, best, best, best, best however one thing the superyacht does not currently have
the best of is internet because the super is a marine vessel and it's limited by the
choice currently on offer and there's a massive infrastructure required to offer internet
and whilst it's not the best it's certainly the most expensive
a 128 megabit per second connection will cost you about a million dollars a year this is because
you're at and you need connection 100 of the time and there are no wires
so you need a satellite connection yes you can get a 4 or 5g data connection but get out in the open
water doesn't work so a home internet service most likely uses fiber optic cables buried underground
and it sends and receives your data so when you type the name of a website into youtube.com into
your web browser this information is sent out to a domain name server or dns server and it requests
the IP address of youtube so a domain name server is like the phone book for the internet and the
IP address is like the phone number of youtube so the handset is returned to your computer via the
same fiber optic cable and then the computer connects to youtube.com via that IP address
when you do the same thing using satellite internet the message is sent out onto the
internet via a satellite in high orbit above the earth and then down to a land earth station or les
and then out onto the internet the reply comes back the same route and
then your device connects to youtube.com all that communication goes through that
satellite via the land air station and this is the connection a superior has to the internet
and every satellite requires a land air station to operate and traditionally satellites used
for this service are in geostationary orbit which means the satellite sits in an orbit that
moves in relation to the rotation of the planet so effectively the satellite is stationary to
the planet and to be able to do this they need to sit at 36 000 kilometers from the earth's surface
and usually are situated over the equator so what are the benefits of geostationary satellites
well one satellite can cover a massive area which can include an entire ocean so you
only need a handful of satellites to give global coverage possibly as little as four the downsides
very expensive satellite hardware for end users of the satellites in space and the end users on ships
it's known as vsat and these are the very big golf ball looking domes you see on super yachts
it takes a long time for the information to travel that long distance through the satellite down to
the land earth station and onto the internet and then back again and this is known as latency and
the geo satellite unfortunately has high latency meaning it's slow another downside is the signal
is because it has to travel so far and it's so weak it can be affected by bad weather this is
sometimes referred to as rain fade uh another downside is that the current geo satellites
they have limited coverage now i know it sounds like i'm contradicting myself but
they cover most of the globe yes but they sit level with the equator in space
and the coverage drops off the further north or the further south you go so if you go past 70
degrees north or 70 degrees south you'll lose the coverage altogether so what's the solution and are
there are there any solutions well enter Elon Musk and the Starling eggheads - All right guys just want
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a month or one premium cup of coffee i'll enter Elon Musk and the Starlink eggheads they have
designed and implemented a system that operates in low earth orbit also known as leo they sit at
600 kilometers from the planet much lower than the 36,000 kilometers of the geosatellites the
benefits of this are much lower latency and much faster potential speeds lower costs the hardware
for the end user us is much less expensive to purchase with almost zero maintenance costs
the potential of worldwide coverage including the polar regions so are there any downsides
well you need many more satellites because the coverage footprint is so much smaller because
the satellite is so close to the planet also the satellites they don't stay in the same position
relative to the earth so they're constantly moving at high speeds with everything that i've
said you would imagine that stalling a dominating internet for marine vessels right the the service
it has faster speeds there's little to no latency the equipment is much much less expensive for end
users well Starlink is still an emerging system they're still deploying their array of satellites
and they're still testing a lot of the equipment so yes you can buy styling internet service for
your home but as far as the maritime industry goes it's not yet a viable alternative plus it's not
available everywhere in the on the planet yet it's mainly us and some european countries so
one thing that currently prevents starling system from dominating the internet at sea is their lack
of ability to send data across the oceans so you remember the land earth stations i talked about
well each satellite in space needs a land earth station to get its data out onto the internet
and as the Leo Installations are much closer to the planet than the traditional geosatellites
and they're constantly moving so the satellite communication with the land earth station is
limited because of the footprint so if you imagine a satellite over the ocean it needs
a land air station to talk to to get out onto the internet and hence therein lies the problem
when these lower earth orbit satellites are over ocean regions they have no lander station to talk
to but imagine if the satellites could talk to each other instead of having to only communicate
with an les they just send it from one to another to another until it reaches the destination so
until recently Elon Musk stalin has been unable to make this work so his satellites
have communicated with land they have stations around the planet like the traditional satellites
but in 2020 Spacex sent up 2 satellites with a communication device that uses lasers
the purpose was to test the ability of satellites talking to each other in
January of this year January of 2021 Spacex sent a further 10 satellites into space
over polar regions all equipped with laser technology and for now starlink is only including
laser links on polar satellites i'm sure that will give the flat earthers something to talk about
but Musk wrote in the tweet only our polar stats have lasers this year and they're on
version 0.9 version 0.9 refers to a beta or testing phase of the equipment
he also wrote in the same tweet something that should be exciting all end users who work at sea
he said this all sats launched next year will have laser links indicating that the laser systems will
become standard on styling satellites in 2022 so what will this mean for super yachts in the future
well it will force the current leaders in the maritime internet industry
to adapt and to catch up with stalwick and i'm sure it will force some of them out of business
completely so our starlings competitors worried well a couple of months ago i spoke to a couple
of technicians from one of these leading companies and and i asked them how they
felt about it and were they worried about the emergence of starlink and the installation of Leo
satellites and what would it mean for them they just laughed and said that they weren't worried
but then later i looked on their website on the the technician's own website i found information
that their company is planning the very same deployment of low-earth orbit satellites
maybe this is why they weren't worried however
they currently don't have any in operation and the first launch is not until 2022. so
they see the future themselves Leo installations but they're already behind in the race
in fact with no satellites in orbit they're not even in the race 3, 2, 1, 0 ignition
vehicle is pitching downrange