home internet speeds are ever increasing and the costs always seem to be getting
less expensive that is of course until you look at maritime internet costs in
the UK Virgin Media has a 100 megabits per second package for 336 pounds or 420
dollars a year what if I told you that same package on a super-earth what costs
seven hundred and thirty three thousand or nine hundred thousand dollars a year
would you believe me and how will Elan musk and Starling
change things and when let's find out finally back in the UK in a new home
studio which is not finished clearly because it's just plain walls there with
me I will get it decorated soon today we're going to talk about all things
internet on super yachts and what do I mean by that I mean how does the super
your gets Internet it's not going to be too technical so don't worry if you're a
layman so a few years ago I made a video on this very subject and basically two
things came of it first of all lots of people corrected me
for saying megabytes instead of megabits yeah shocking you know so that was a
mistake on my part obviously all internet providers sell in
megabits per second I might do it again by accident in this video but I did I
clearly mean megabits per second the second thing that came of it is even now
even today I get messages well II la most StarLink is gonna resolve all these
problems is going to be cheaper for everybody when he launches StarLink in
2020 we'll come back to that later
so any CPR effectively has four ways to connect to the internet
number one is a 4G cellular number two is Wi-Fi offered by many marinas number
three is a shore connection or cable connection and number four is visa also
known as suck suffer like communications the most often use and by far the most
expensive so a quick question pause the video here
what does VSAT stand for don't google it just put it in the comments if you know
what it is alright come back to it later okay so we'll go through them one by one
so the first one is 4G obviously 4G everybody uses it on the phones
you know SIM card in your phone get data or you go so on a yacht it's not quite
so simple we have devices called the pep wave or a MIMO cellular device which is
like a small modem that accepts cellular SIM cards and then from there we run an
antenna we put an antenna on the mast we run a cable down to this device and then
we connect this device to them their ships network and when we're in a place
where we can get and that Network then we can switch over to that and
everybody's on 4G this works basically like any mobile phone but it's more
complicated and you can put multiple SIM cards in there so the pros of 4G clearly
is the speed it's relatively inexpensive compared to the satellite communications
and there's virtually no latency we'll come back to that later
the cons of 4G or cellular data is the range range is limited six to twenty
miles offshore but more like more like ten miles maximum in my experience
most normal SIM cards that you get are limited even when they say on the
limiters they have a little asterisk next to where they're underneath if you
look at the small print it says fair use policy always start effects basically
meaning if you use it if you abuse it they'll cut you debt they'll cut you
back even though it says unlimited the other problem of the normal SIM card
because I got a lot of comments oh I've got unlimited on my phone take that to
another country in CI a gallon so some some cars have European roaming in in
the European cards some American ones have roaming in in there Canada and
stuff like that but yachts go all over the world so it's not really it doesn't
really work for a super yacht unless it's just hanging out in a marina in
Florida or something ok the next one what we've got is Wi-Fi so most marinas
as part of the service they offer a Wi-Fi service it's usually included in
the price and the yachts have these systems where we can piggyback onto it
and rebroadcast it through the ship on the ships know where this is this is you
know this is quite popular the speeds are relatively good so that's the pro
the pros is that the speed is usually quite good the cons are is not always
available and the speeds vary at different marinas and of course the
range is limited usually to that marina
number three is show connection a lot of the marina's you'll go in you'll see
these posts sticking out the ground they've got water connection without
electricity and they've got Internet not all of them but a lot of the Murray the
bigger marinas tend to have this so basically we go outside we plug in
ethernet cable in I mean run it into the ship and then we switch over to that
this is the this is the most preferred one by any superyacht really because
these are we this is where you get the speeds the real speeds like 100 megabits
100 megabits per second plus so the pros are the speed the cons are limited to
being plugged into the network obviously all of an other limitation is the cable
if you run a cable length longer than 50 meters then you've ever run into
problems so unless you can put a root set in between that cable run to boost
the signal it's not going to make it any further really than 50 meters okay and
the last one but the most important one is visa and if you've ever wondered what
those golf ball shaped things are on top of super yachts they are for satellite
communications inside of that dome you have antennas parabolic antennas on
pedestals 360 degree pedestals and they can track satellites anywhere in the
world unless you're in the Antarctic or the Arctic you can get internet signals
usually they connect to satellites in geostationary orbit so what is
geostationary orbit that basically means the satellites are about thirty six
thousand kilometres above the earth aligned along the equator so I know what
you're thinking the earth is moving so how does that work well at this height
they move in time with the earth to us effectively they're in the same position
relative to the earth rotates the premise of the pros of visa
obviously it can be used anywhere you can use it in the marina you can use it
you can use it in a city he news it out at sea in the middle of the ocean this
is the only one that works if you go any further than that you crossed me I don't
take the route in the ocean this is what this is all you have the cons of visa is
the biggest con I don't mean con pros and cons the biggest con is the cost
firstly you have to you have to invest in antennas right so they are depending
on which antennas you get that starts at around $30,000 US dollars and they go up
to over a hundred thousand US dollars there's a three point four meter hybrid
that's available very expensive hybrid in that it does two different signals
it's a sea bond and it does kayuu bandwidth out I don't want to go into
that too much in this video the second problem or come with with this is the
speeds so there are some providers now that offer while the some providers that
offer higher than this but the big providers offer the highest number they
offer is about a hundred megabits per second which is its fast by maritime
standards but by home standards now it's not that fast really sort of average
isn't it one of the other big problems with VSAT is the latency I mentioned it
earlier you type in an email you hit Send
it has to travel 36,000 kilometers up to space to the sepoys then it gets to the
stuff weighs then it asked to travel 36,000 kilometers back down to earth to
a land earth station which is basically a hole on the ground which takes all the
data that comes in from that satellite and disperses it out onto the internet
so this this delay is called latency it's a bit like if you're in a thunder
and lightning storm you see the lightning and then you hear the thunder
so many seconds later you can actually count the seconds to tell you
approximately how far away that lightning is right
another problem with visa is it can be affected by the weather so you have
something called rain and cloud attenuation or we call it rain fade so
if you have heavy rain or very heavy thick clouds as to be very heavy it can
affect the connection because your antennas pointing up into space at this
satellite and if this is the thick layer of cloud in between or heavy rain then
the signal just starts to drop out that can be at both ends so you you might be
in the Caribbean and you I mean the weather's beautiful you've got a blue
sky but where your land earth station is let's say it's in Spain if they've got a
heavy rain that they can't get the signal from the satellites so even
though you're in the clear they're not that can be a problem and that's why big
companies like MTN SAP of the now called priva they've got multiple lander
stations so if there's got bad weather at one they can just switch to another
some of the smaller companies they only have one land earth station but I won't
go into that too much
so firstly the 4G systems usually what we do on the UPS is when we're in Europe
we'll get a SIM card from that these are special SIM cards that are just data
only and the designs are work in the entire region so there's probably like
50 60 countries so if you're in the Europe in the Mediterranean you
basically covered in all the European Union countries I believe the same is if
you're in North America or the Caribbean you can usually get one that works in
all those places the cost is measured per gigabyte
downloaded so the more you download the smaller the per gigabyte cost is but
generally a yacht of say 70s and 98 metres with a crew of say 25 to 30 plus
the guests all the systems that they'll generally use let's say hundreds of to
160 gigabytes downloaded per month and most of the companies that the cost of
that data will be about four four and a half euros per gigabyte so that works
out at about 700 per 20 euros a month which is a lot of money isn't it it's
not in comparison to the visa but it's still a lot of money it's not like your
$30 a month a limited plan which is not really unlimited usually so the Ethernet
and Wi-Fi they are they are often included in the birthing costs of the
yacht but not all of them do that some of them charge an extra on top but it's
a nominal charge because it's connected to a land-based system so they don't
charge very much for that at all okay so visa okay so hold on to your hats now
and if you look at this list here for 10 megabits per second you can see there
but the price is assuming you have a yearly contract is twelve thousand two
hundred dollars of US dollars per month this is one of the premium
satellite internet providers in the yachting industry if you see the columns
the first column tells you your mi AR or maximum information rates this is what
you'll get if there's enough free bandwidth on that beam or on that can
on the satellite the next column tells you Cir this is committed information
rate this is what the providers are required by contract to give you and you
can see the CA are four twelve thousand two hundred euros per month is the only
guarantees to be two megabits per second so you'll you're paying for twenty nine
ten megabits per second but that's only if it's available and if if you complain
that you're only getting two makes and they look and they'll just say well you
get and what's in your contract so that's it and let's just fun let's look
at the price of the hundred megabits per second as you can see it's seventy five
thousand six hundred dollars per month that's a lot of money even for a
billionaire what most jobs do is they have a let's say they have four megabits
or ten megabits connection and when the owner comes on and they want more speed
they boost it for that period let's say the owner says he's coming on for two
weeks they boost this the signal up to 20 megabits per second right so at the
end of that time money he leaves them and drops back down again automatically
now when you when you get that service that the prices are even higher so you
cuz you're temporarily boost in your signal it's it's much more expensive
you'll probably think that the owners you know the owners are all billionaires
are all rich they don't care about this stuff they're the amount of money they
spend on that yacht they don't care about this we'd be wrong they do care
and that I never had most of the owners I've worked for
they've all complained about the cost of the Internet
things that came up in my last video an awful lot in the comments and it still
comes up now is wait so ill ammos launches StarLink in 2020 20 it's all
going to change they're gonna put satellites in space many satellites
thousands of satellites but they're not going to put them at geostationary orbit
they're gonna put them in something called low-earth orbits or Leo orbit and
that's about 600 kilometres what's going to happen is the the latency that we
talked about earlier the time it goes up it takes to go up to that geostationary
satellite will be eliminated and you'll get speeds more like you get on land
with it with a wired connection the problem with that system is when you put
stuff guys in low-earth orbit it does it's not stationary so it's constantly
moving so as the planets spinning the satellites moving like this so you have
to have many of them the other thing is because they're so low the footprint
that that satellite can cover is smaller so where the geostationary satellite has
a massive footprint because it's so far away from the planet it can cover you
imagine you get your torch and you're shining on a football that the further
away you take that the more it covers but the weaker it gets right so when you
pop it close you get a stronger signal but you don't have the coverage so they
have lots of them and they and the plan is eventually is that all of these
satellites will be covered the complete globe will be covered with these
satellites and they will all communicate with each other so when you send the
message from say New York and you want to send it to London it will go up so
the once otherwise and then it will be passed along a series of satellites
until it reaches London unfortunately the Elom musculars egghead scientists
haven't figured out yet how to make the satellites communicate with each other
effectively with the data he has to have a land earth station for each satellite
like the traditional geostationary satellites so what's going to happen is
even though he's going to have a series of of these satellites or moving
these in these orbits they can't communicate with each other so they're
all going to be sending the data down to different lambda stations the problem
for chips is when you're out at sea and in the ocean there's going to be no land
earth station so there's probably going to be a signal for our hundred miles or
so off the coast but then you it's it's gonna be like 4G but with a better range
but then you're gonna go out further and you're gonna lose that signal so until
they can figure out how to make those soft way to communicate with each other
then it's not a viable solution also he says that by 2027 or starlings say that
by 2027 about seven years time they'll have 12,000 satellites covering the
planet but that's not enough for complete coverage they're going to need
42,000 satellites eventually and they currently don't even have or they don't
have they haven't released the plan of when that is likely to be so at least
for seven years this is not going to be a solution for for yachting
so StarLink will revolutionize satellites satellite internet in the
future but it's not going to be for at least another how I would say it's
probably going to be a decade before it's it fully and it's fully implemented
what might happen is there might be a situation where in the Mediterranean and
in North America you have almost complete coverage of those areas at sea
so you might be able to use go between those and and and you know get good
coverage there is another problem every vessel that's currently out there does
not have any equipments on board that will communicate with this system so
that every vessel would have to go in and be reef retrofitted with an antenna
capable of transmitting and receiving to these new satellites so that's more cost
to the owner I'm sure they won't mind that with the promise of very high
speeds with low latency book it's it's it's you know it's gonna take time for
that to happen as well so if you did try to guess what a V set stands for it
stands for very small aperture terminal which means completely nothing to most
of us but anyway there you go so if you did get it you get it right well done
all right guys so I hope you enjoyed the video if you've got any questions which
I'm sure you will have in the comments and I'm sure they're gonna be some Elon
Musk fans corrected me on this but this is what I know from a lot of research
and a lot of communications with various different companies so anyway yeah let's
talk about in the comments let me know what you think and don't forget to
subscribe and I will catch you soon alright guys bye
you