The latter appears to have the communications industry captivated. Crew are reportedly demanding greater access to the internet and the industry is responding, citing its importance in retention and the risks of ignoring such requests.

The perceived shortage of skilled and qualified crew is driving demand for bandwidth far in excess of that for business use. In doing so, it skews the VSAT demand figures, not least because the kind of applications seafarers would like to use are so bandwidth hungry.

To Kuba this puts the cart and horse in the wrong order. The potential of social media tools is huge and growing, but to use a shortage of seafarers as a driver to growth is to misunderstand the current situation.

“First of all, I don’t think this effect is happening as much as some journalists say and as much as some shipping industry ‘politicians’ claim. People are saying every day that the younger generation will not go to sea. I’m being very honest with you now, but the younger generation has no choice, because there is no other employment at the moment,” he says.

The popularity of cadetships at the UK’s Trinity House is growing year by year, not least because of the introduction of tuition fees but Kuba says across Europe, the realisation that a junior officer can earn £35,000 a year tax free is enough for them to make the leap and if that means no internet access, so be it.

“I’m not very popular for saying things like this. I’m seen as being controversial but this is how I see it,” he says. “I also believe that a lot of youngsters are clever enough to know how to communicate whenever the vessel is in port or near shore, so the periods with no communication might be quite limited depending on the trade they are in.”

The ‘bring your own device’ trend where more youngsters have their own laptops or smartphones means they are increasingly adept at getting online. But he says lack of signal is only half the problem.

Also at issue is that owners are increasingly looking to crew to share the cost burden of crew calling, providing the best possible way to accurately measure demand. “The owners are saying OK, but you need to pay half or a percentage and that immediately shows you that youngsters can do without it. If it is free of charge then everybody uses it, but as soon as you have to pay something, then all of a sudden you find that they can do without it,” he notes.

He mentions a large tanker company which put a lot of resources into free onboard internet for crew use but found the cost so prohibitive that they were forced to put more and more restrictions in place as the price for free access. The result, to coin a phrase is neither public nor convenient.

But Kuba’s iconoclasm doesn’t stop there. The industry needs to understand the simplest of drivers – supply and demand.

“I think it is very important to understand there is no shortage of seafarers,” he states. “There is a surplus of seafarers, even in the LNG sector. Owners are not struggling to get crew and some are asking why should I go the extra mile, they will come to me anyhow.”

That’s a big statement in an industry where ‘shortage of crew’, like ‘high fuel costs’ and ‘too much regulation’ is an article of faith. Is Kuba really saying the industry has all the skilled and competent seafarers it needs? Just as in communications, you get what you pay for, he thinks.

“If you want a good quality crew they are there. If you want the best, well, that’s hard because everybody is after them. If you pay the bottom of the market, that’s what you will get. It’s like having sex and not imagining you might have a child. Owners are getting very cheap crew and expecting to have excellent standards and quality,” he adds.

But as to their expectations, he sees the potential of social media as the glue that can bind seafarers together, and maybe let their would-be employers in on the game too. He contests whether Facebook and Skype are truly household names onboard ship, but says the effect on seafarers is immediate and obvious.

“If you think from the psychological point of view. I might work with you for four months and then there is a chance then I will never work with you again. But we became friends and we want to keep in touch. Facebook is a beautiful solution to that, which is why seafarers use it so much, along with things like CrewToo or MyShip.”

Intermanager is hardly the first industry body to have a Facebook page but he has noted that it gets double the traffic than the official website, primarily from seafarers.

“I was asking myself the question why and the answer is it comes with age. In shipmanagement, you’ve got people my age or older and onboard the vessels you’ve got people my age or younger and to these guys it’s what they grew up with.”

The desire to keep in touch and the availability of the tools to make it happen provides a natural win for an organisation so interested in the crew that make world trade go around.

“The most successful companies realise that Facebook does not have to be an enemy. It should be a tool to tap into seafarers, so listen to them, see how morale is, what is motivating them, to keep a finger on the pulse,” he suggests.

It is that – rather than outfitting the ship with a fat communications pipe and footing the bill – that he believes will make a difference in getting the best crew to work with your company. And as he adds, compared to Inmarsat or VSAT, the investment is far lower.

“Still, when I talk to people, people say Facebook gives you no return on investment. First of all, the investment is minimal; it’s time not money. But what it brings is a lot of traffic, a lot of interesting stuff. It is difficult to measure, but how much would you pay to get to five thousand people on your database, most of whom are potential employees? All I know is you would have to spend a lot of money on advertising to achieve anything similar.”

My interest for catching up with him was prompted by his having taken part in the recent Satellite 2013 conference in Washington, illustrating a growing interest in communications on behalf of Intermanager members. Some 12 months previously he had given a rather effective dressing down to VSAT providers at the Global VSAT Forum just after MaritimeInsight got going, so I was keen to see what progress he had made in making the process of buying satcoms more transparent.

As always when talking to Kuba, the conversation took in related subjects and included some strong opinions. Nonetheless, this is an organisation that wants to change things, so a straight line is not always the most effective route from A to B.

Intermanager’s interest in satellite communications stems from not just from a desire to shake up the buying process. It is founded on the belief that communications form a vital and undervalued link in the business process as well as in crew welfare.

“Intermanager is always talking about crew and I thought it was time to start walking the talk,” he explains. “We really care about our crew and that means the crew as both a worker and as an employee.”

“What we wanted to bring forward is that communication is also extremely important for the viability of our businesses. Without good communication, without good core connection with vessels we will struggle,” he goes on. As a former fleet General Manager for MOL Tankship, his experience had convinced him that users were not getting what VSAT had promised them.

“For the last few years, we have been, let’s say ‘misled’ and we could not afford that anymore. When we only had Inmarsat everybody knew what the boundaries were, expectations were quite limited but Inmarsat was able to meet these expectations. As soon as VSAT came onboard, expectations have been blown out of proportion by the providers,” he adds.

The biggest problem was the assumption that maritime users made that they would soon be enjoying terrestrial broadband speeds. But his gripe was not that VSAT failed to usher in an era of social media and internet use but that VSAT services failed to do what they said on the tin despite running to big bucks.

“We were told we would get 365 days of connection but they forgot to say there would be no service between Australia and Cape Town. Intermanager said, OK, enough is enough. We can always whinge but this will not improve the situation. So we sat down with GVF and we gave them some very constructive criticism and they were happy to take the feedback.”

Suitably chastened no doubt, GVF got Intermanager involved in its events and brought the organisation together with the providers. Kuba happily admits this was not one way traffic, the managers had to improve their knowledge too.

To be fruitful, this could never be just a question of blaming the VSAT guys, but rather looking for sources of assistance and that meant shipmanagers could help themselves by deciding clearly what they needed.

The organisation commissioned Stark Moore McMillan to undertake a survey to gauge return on investment for shipmanagers, “so we could help our guys to see how much money they have to invest in order to achieve more, what were areas which could benefit most and which might benefit least from good communications” he explains.

In providing a tool to help in decision-making Kuba says managers have moved from ‘an educated guess to an educated management decision’ and he says the vendors have listened and moved too.

“I’m extremely pleased because it shows them we were right! There are cowboys in shipmanagement and the same applies to the VSAT system providers. The name of the game here is listening, so they sat down with us and said OK you tell us what your problems are and we together will try to work out the best possible solutions. That is what I was hoping for three years ago and we are some way to achieving that.”

He agrees there are members who decide they still know better but he says even the switched-on companies need help and advice so the opportunity to work directly with suppliers is welcome.

He says many on the sell-side realised they had to up their game if they wanted to sell to owners bumping along the bottom of a terrible market and for whom the to do list starts with the regulatory must-haves and works down to the nice to have add-ons.

“It’s not only VSAT, some of the bigger providers manage terrestrial communication, GSM, data exchanges so they are able to pull a lot of strings. I didn’t expect some of them to know as much about shipping as they did but I ended talking to one who said ‘what about ECDIS, we’ve got a nice solution for you guys’ and that was the icing on the cake.”

The Intermanager engagement strategy is simple, if demanding: be professional, do your homework, understand what makes a shipmanager tick and what can be done to make their life easier. Without that it’s best not to come to the table.

Isn’t it a problem though, that just as the industry sees light at the end of the tunnel, the broader satellite industry is regarding maritime as a potential pot of gold? The risk is that not just incumbents become more aggressive but that new players steam in and destabilise a market that is just getting back on its feet.

Kuba sees the same trend and a repeat of the original path of VSAT into maritime. Other markets have been already saturated and with revenues from government or land mobile under pressure and aero still emerging, shipping looks like a safe bet.

“A lot of them have a misconception in that they see shipping as the big passenger vessels so it is an eye-opener to discover there are only have 350 of those. That might have put them off but they don’t have many other places to go so suddenly the other 75,000 vessels look very tempting. But just because you can sell one million iPhones doesn’t mean all those ships want or can afford VSAT. Using your iPhone might mean paying $20 dollars a month not $5,000 a month for VSAT,” he says.

The number of commercial aircraft also compares poorly to ships, prompting a revival of interest at the point when potential customer advantage can be gained from better communication.

“Everybody has a vessel, everyone has crew but only very few can provide an excellent communication link with your customers so users now are demanding more. The charterer used to ask the manager or operator where is my vessel, what is the ETA, where should I put my trucks? These days the manager can say ‘don’t ask me, log in and you can see all that information.”

Coming up in Part 2 – why the crew calling trend could be overdone and whether there really is a shortage of seafarers.

The one thing the editor was clear on was that I couldn’t speak to any airtime providers – or at least couldn’t include any of their comments in the article. The piece had to be purely on the developments in the market and how owners and managers were responding.

What I found was largely what I expected – a movement towards Ku-band VSAT among the higher end owners and a period of adjustment elsewhere as buyers transition off older and increasingly expensive L-band systems and onto lower per MB packages as a positional move ahead of HTS systems becoming available within the next few years.

There is some mixing and matching of systems going on, based on areas of operation and there is the usual trade-off between the coverage and higher bandwidth models. The more specialist the operator of course, the more focussed the usage, with ferry operator Stena Rederi using hybrid services to cover crew, passenger and business use. It also has a service agreement that effectively transfers a lot of the performance risk onto its provider, but Stena says the relationship has prospered as a result.

For the tanker owners such as Laurin Maritime, crew usage is unsurprisingly cited as the primary driver for VSAT contracts and business use remains a secondary consideration for the most part.

What they mostly think is that satcoms are still too expensive – or at least that they expect the landside model to prevail – guaranteed performance up to a point, faster services and lower prices resulting from stronger competition.

In the process of upgrading its fleet, Intership Navigation of Cyprus also sought even more flexibility, the ability to conclude short term rental agreements rather than make purchases or conclude long term leases.

That seems surprising when airtime suppliers are pricing so aggressively to win business from each other, but it might make sense if suppliers could provide a service that gives the owner a completely new level of flexibility.

There is also a sense that buyers are risk averse, sensing that the shift from L-Band to VSAT and on to HTS carries the risk of the unknown that in the current climate could be a risk too far. This might be conservatism and it might be experience.

One owner reminded me of the Connexion by Boeing debacle, when the mainstream satellite market once again eyed maritime as some kind of untapped opportunity. Its complete failure made for great copy at the time but a salutory warning.

Shipowners have long memories as well as big problems and shallow pockets. Selling to this market will take a golden touch. The idea of being first to market is less appealing than in the heady days pre-2008. Expensive mistakes are not an option.

Oh and by the way in case you are wondering, I didnt choose the headline – my suggestion was a lot more sanguine – but I hope you enjoy the article.

In maritime communications almost the opposite is happening. Having fought a year-long campaign in 2012 and a bitter winter engagement into the first quarter of this year, something close to peace appears to have broken out between satcom’s warring factions.

It’s like the scene in many a war movie when the NCO turns to the officer and says “I don’t like it sir, it’s too quiet.” The recent Sea-Asia show was a case in point.

There were some nice Widgets from SingTel (which also had a stand to gladden the eye of many a sea-dog, while arguably doing somewhat less for gender equality) and some contract announcements here and there, but apart from that not much to set the heart racing.

Many of the familiar players were there but the message seemed to be more ‘keep calm and carry on’ than ‘once more into the breach’.

That makes sense. Consider the situation across what we might at a stretch call the Rebel Alliance. Intelsat looked to have timed the equity market rally right but its IPO eventually priced below expectations. Whether that or its recent launch failure have any impact on its plans for EPIC remains open to some question.

Iridium used the recent Satellite 2013 conference to firm up plans for Iridium Next, laying out ambitious schedules for the build programme but seems to be as focussed on Aireon and the aero sector right now as maritime.

Globalstar too appears confident it can restructure itself sufficiently to secure the funding it needs to put its launch plans into practice, though it seems to be testing investors’ patience.

At this point it would make sense to comment on O3B but since they consistently ignore any requests for information (and seem to have instructed their clients to do the same) we’ll have to assume that plans for cruise market domination continue to take shape in the dormant volcano (or similar) that they use for an HQ.

The news from KVH suggests reinforcement too – a deal with Iridium to provide a connection in polar regions when users are outside VSAT or FB coverage areas. From their point of view a neat way to work around the price rises on FB pay as you go, though you can’t help thinking they have spiked their own guns rather than turning them on the old lady.

Having asked Inmarsat what they were up to during the Singapore show, the answer was ‘business development’ rather than ‘marketing offensive’. The appearance of Frank Coles on SinoShip’s Maritime CEO column doesn’t really change that in my view.

There is a good reason for that. At the CMA Shipping 2013 conference last month Coles sat at the end of a very long panel speakers about maritime technology innovation. Each was interesting in their own way and most had a story to tell of the kind of operational insights and efficiencies that could be gained from greater use of data. Oh and the tidal wave of data that could be generated by crew communications if only they were given unrestricted web access.

Coles had the task for once of delivering the reality check – some of this was possible now, some would come in due course and some might not happen any time soon. It was a salutary lesson for the dreamers and a reminder to regular students of this subject that cart and horse must be in the right order to pull ammunition to the troops in the front line as well as hauling away the casualties.

I didn’t attend the ACI Maritime Communications conference at the end of March but I understand from those that were there that the face-off between Coles and self-styled nemesis Alan Gottleib was more phoney war than shock and awe.

There are solid reasons why this is a positive development. The next few years will see the maritime industry begin to emerge from the downturn but this will happen in a piecemeal and messy way. Anyone imagining there will be a return to the good old days where all boats rise on the incoming tide should probably get out now.

That gives the satellite industry and its technology partners some breathing space in which to actually do the work necessary to deliver the next generation of services about which it has been talking for so long. As noted above, financing has to be nailed down, orders placed, satellites built and launched, ancillary systems developed and some cases technologies created for the first time.

Alliances and treaties need to be shored up too – between vendors, distributors and partners – and in the process we could see some of the mergers and consolidation so long predicted.

This peace cannot be expected to last forever of course. In early June the DigitalShip roadshow moves on to Oslo and Nor-Shipping, where the first Maritime CIO Forum will be held on 5 June. There will be some presentations but the afternoon session will see a high level debate with representatives from the vendors and partners and I hope industry users, moderated by me since the editor will by then be knee-deep in nappies.

By then perhaps we will have heard more about what happens next but even so I think we should be prepared to sit this one out for a while longer. There may be a temporary ceasefire but the war is far from over.

Or as Stephen Stills put it so eloquently in Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ “…battle lines been drawn, nobody’s right when everybody’s wrong…”

In the first minutes and hours following a natural disaster, the terror of what has just occurred is tinged with chaos. Power, water and communications networks are often knocked out, citizens scramble to save themselves, their family and friends, while governments struggle to maintain order and provide assistance.

But as relief groups and government agencies begin to put together their response, they have a powerful alliance on their side, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and Thuraya Telecommunications.

Thuraya has a longstanding relationship with the ITU, through which it provides free  satellite terminals including both handheld satphones and broadband terminals to support communications during disaster recovery. And as the ITU’s Chief of Department, Project Support and Knowledge Management, Dr Cosmas Zavazava points out, the relationship provides a vital first link in supporting governments, NGOs and victims.

“I have been there myself in the immediate aftermath of a disaster and in the first hours you find that people are totally disorientated at every level, right up to the government,” he explains. “Usually the power has failed and communications are non-existent. The Thuraya equipment gives us some connectivity which we can share with governments so that they can co-ordinate their functions. At the same time we also provide the units to as many humanitarian agencies as possible.”

The aid agencies will use the equipment themselves and also make them available to survivors. “There are often queues of people who desperately want to call their loved ones. It may seem a small thing but in practice we have found it reduces anxiety and it really touches the core of the family.”

Satellite communications is the ideal channel for connectivity when terrestrial networks are disrupted. The agreement between Thuraya and  ITU sees the Dubai-based company donate the hardware and the ITU contribute towards the costs of airtime as well as maintaining the units and shipping them to and from affected areas.

“When a disaster happens, we react immediately, dispatching the equipment wherever it is needed and training users on the spot. They normally keep the equipment up to three months but it depends to some extent on the magnitude of the disaster,” he explains.

Once on the ground, the phones are deployed in initial search and rescue, co-ordination of humanitarian and refugee logistics, managing the delivery of food and shelter and the delivery of medication. The phones are capable of both voice and data communications and Dr Zavazava says the quality of the Thuraya network is crucial in giving confidence that key agencies will stay online in the first days after the disaster.

The quality and reliability of the satellite signal makes a huge difference. We are pleased to note that we have not experienced any congestion problems with Thuraya equipment and network,  even during a major disaster when a lot of people are using it,” he says.

Applications vary from regular voice calls to data and videoconferencing in support of the relief effort. Aid agencies can call colleagues and request particular medicines or equipment and he has no doubt that having reliable communications in place can be the difference between life and death.

“Having such equipment in place can absolutely make a difference between saving and losing lives. People who might have died of infection can get the right medicines on time. It is also vital for search and rescue efforts as the GPS functionality helps rescue teams find and help survivors as quickly as possible.”

The ITU works with government agencies, the private sector, and NGOs to protect human life when disasters strike. A lot of emphasis is put on developing concise and clear standard operating procedures that define who does what, when and how. Human and institutional capacity building is an integral part of the disaster management effort.

“In a catastrophe, investments and infrastructure that took years for governments and businesses to build can disappear in a matter of moments.  Reliable uninterrupted communications is vital before, during and in the immediate aftermath of disasters.

To deliver this safety net requires a strong relationship between governments, the private sector, United Nations Agencies, NGOs, and communities.  “The relationship we have with Thuraya and other private sector partners is there for others to emulate. A true relationship is like the ripening of a fruit, it takes many years to build and it needs patience and nurturing.”

So much so in fact that the ITU last year awarded Thuraya the first ITU Humanitarian Award in recognition of the company’s generous contributions to saving lives during emergencies.

The ITU’s position as a leading UN Specialized Agency in telecommunications/information and communication technologies recently saw it support UN aid agencies providing humanitarian assistance to victims of civil strife in Mali particularly internally displaced persons and refugees in camps in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

The agency maintains a firmly non-political stance. Dr Zavazava says operationally, the ITU’s main role is intervention in natural disasters, but it also assists other UN Agencies as they fulfil their mandate helping support disaster victims.

“Our primary concern is to save lives using all means of communications. The ITU founding fathers put in our Constitution that telecommunications must save life in the air, on land and at sea. We take this calling very seriously.”

The resulting report has generated considerable interest. But while Adamson says it is encouraging to see so many shipmanagers and operators recognising the operational benefits of improved communications from a crew retention perspective, in this guest blog, he lays out why he believes there is a wider opportunity which comparatively few in the industry are really grasping.

Considering the enduring importance of crew retention it may seem surprising that until last year no organisation had commissioned definitive independent research into the communications requirements and habits of seafarers.

However, when confronted with the logistics of reaching, collecting and analysing the written, paper responses of almost 1,000 officers and ratings, this lack of comprehensive research becomes rather more understandable.

Key to any research project is the quality of the data and the sample. Had we not been working with PTC and CF Sharp which between them send over 47,000 crew each year to over 1,000 vessels in the commercial cargo and passenger sectors, it is unlikely such a survey would have been possible.

It certainly wouldn’t have produced such high quality data and responses. With the total market for satellite based crew communications estimated at approximately 925,000 individuals, our sample represents in the region of 1% of the market – making the dataset both fascinating and statistically significant.

One of the headline results has been that 68% of seafarers now have access to communications whilst at sea either all or most of the time with only 2% reporting that they never have access to communications. However those headline figures mask a wide variance between different sectors. For instance the passengership sector, despite having the highest levels of communications equipment on board, provides the lowest levels of free crew communications of any sector.

In common with the passenger sector, offshore vessels have very high levels of equipment, but neither of these are principally driven by crew communications requirements. For the passenger sector, high-bandwidth communications systems are major revenue generators with the penetration of VSAT extremely high.

Similarly, the offshore sector is well penetrated with VSAT systems as charterer requirements dictate high-bandwidth be available, but in contrast to the passenger sector, offshore vessels offer far better access to free and paid-for communications, most likely a reflection of the scarcity of qualified offshore crew.

Across the sectors 46% of crew are not provided with any form of free communications at all. In the context of crew retention that figure should be raising eyebrows.

As a regular speaker at the Informa Manning & Training conference, where this year I’ve been asked to speak to delegates in Dubrovnik about crew communications, I consistently hear managers and operators wrestling with the issue of crew retention.

I’m repeatedly being told that the expense of training crew means that retaining them offers real dollar savings and competitive advantage. When one considers the noise VSAT has been making over the past several years it is curious that we are still in a situation where almost half of all seafarers have no access to free communications, when the ability to provide them with such would not only assist in their retention, but also offer broader opportunities to ship managers and operators.

I think this is where the real issues lie. Traditionally the expense of satellite communications together with the necessity for robust equipment and reliability in an environment where mission-critical literally equates to life and death, has always meant failure wasn’t an option and experimentation challenging.

As one of the most regulated industries in the world, shipping is about compliance and meeting minimum requirements. In many respects it is a unique industry, but it is not immune from the digital revolution which has swept up every other.

With the IMO advocating an over-arching e-navigation strategy combining ECDIS with new technologies converging across navigation, IT and communications, the landscape of maritime business is changing fast.

The opportunities for forward thinking ship managers and operators are highly significant, but unlocking maritime’s digital promise will require a major shift in thinking. IT, communications and digital technologies have the potential to drive cost savings, service improvements and the all-important crew retention.

In my experience shipmanagers and operators are hungry to understand how and where their businesses can implement and benefit from these changes, but as yet suppliers aren’t creating the cross-businesses value propositions to help them.

By commissioning the Crew Communications 2012 survey Astrium have signaled their intention to address this need. The wealth of information it has provided to shipmanagers and operators about the crew they depend upon is extremely valuable, but it’s only the beginning of what’s required.

Case studies have always been the primary tool in the maritime salesperson’s armoury, but what’s needed now are more independent, in-depth studies and analysis which can inform both suppliers, and ship managers and operators.

The advent of new High Throughput Satellite systems, from Intelsat EPIC to Inmarsat’s GlobalXpress, O3B to Iridium NEXT, means bandwidth and speeds will accelerate further. But without the context of operational implementation and potential cost efficiencies these systems are just adding a new level of complexity for ship managers and operators.

We are approaching an era of real technology convergence in maritime which has the potential to transform the industry for the better. Doing so will require technology suppliers to gain a far more holistic and in-depth understanding of the shipping business. And for ship managers and operators to help them.

A condensed version of the Stark Moore McMillan report, Crew Communications 2012 is available for download from here.

Over the last year I’ve tried to unpick the main issues impacting communications and technology. I probably haven’t always got it right but my guiding principle was to provide a forum for neutral debate on where the sector is going and how that fits with the wider industry.

That commitment remains because the 12 months have shown that left to the marketing men, there is as much spin and smoke around as there is clear guiding information. And because the next couple of years will likely define who survives and who falls by the wayside.

As I have noted it in recent posts, communications is a market in the midst of an upheaval and one for which the future will look somewhat like the past but there will be fundamental changes too. The next challenge is probably less about selecting systems and more about empowering and enabling crew to ensure that the users can extract real value from them.

One need only look at the latest DigitalShip to see that VSAT has gone from a nice to have to a must-have for owners of high quality tonnage. The emergence of the HTS era will see that trend strengthen but there are big questions to be asked and answered.

Will Inmarsat continue to gain enough traction on XpressLink to cement the take up of GlobalXpress? Will Intelsat get its IPO away and EPIC in service? and will Iridium NEXT get off the ground? Will Globalstar’s second-generation play come good? I recently authored an article for Via Satellite on the step change in satellite comms and I couldn’t get O3B to tell me anything so I guess they are busy.

How far will Ku-band VSAT be able to keep up the pressure on all these? And what happens to L-band spectrum as owners begin to move away from their comfort zone?

As Maersk Maritime Technology’s Bo Cerup Simonsen put it at last week’s GreenShip Technology conference, the biggest challenge is not technology, or financing or sustainability, it is ‘survivability’ and whether shipping companies and their suppliers have the financial stability to last the course.

Maersk of course is the industry’s bellwether, a company which defines engagement with the core shipping issues, principally the need to get a handle on big data and in the process improve operational efficiency.

The Maersk fleet of 870 large containerships ships is already reporting into a single database, with data flowing almost continuously on an automated basis, helping the company develop performance benchmarks on people and ships alike.

That means that big blue can sharpen its competitive edge, assessing the impact of fuel saving technologies and comparing vessel performance, dropping poorly performing chartered tonnage and bringing in younger ships as necessary. Crew are incentivised to improve performance within safe working limits.

“It’s a case of deciding if you are going to do the minimum or the best, to work beyond what is regulated and maintain your vision,” Simonsen said. “The key aspect for us is to make sure that the data and software burden are not placed on the crew. We monitor and measure then discuss with the crew what the implications are.”

Properly resourcing crew training was fundamental to this – there was no point in investing in technology without helping crew get the most out of it. So once again we are back to the humanware. Software, technology, systems, these are just means to an end. The real challenge is to educate and change mindsets.

They are right. The insolvency of three single-ship KG companies associated with Hamburg’s Vega Reederei the same week underlined the fact that the German shipping market and the finance system that supports it are under serious threat.

The picture is the same globally, though owners have managed to defer the worst effects by burning through the cash piles amassed pre-2008 and because the banks (another group with rather bigger things on their mind) haven’t moved to repossess because interest rates have been so low.

That is changing and satellite communications may not escape unscathed as the market tightens. For a SOLAS universe of either 40,000 or perhaps closer to 70,000 merchant ships, there are at least three MSS airtime providers, dozens of DPs and SPs and rivals from FSS who moved into maritime a few years ago.

As Marlink’s Knut Natvig mentioned in his first-day introduction, the SP is the glue between the airtime provider and the customer – they have the crucial role of getting pricing right and adding value.

Now, the usual suspects will already be saying that Inmarsat is doing a pretty good job of putting smaller SPs out of business by raising PAYG prices, but looked at dispassionately, something will have to change.

Indeed, it has already changed. An SP of my acquaintance is fond of remarking that selling airtime may have been the past but certainly won’t be the future. When an OEM or a software vendor can also be an airtime provider, the fight gets too tough for many.

This will force the SPs to get better at what they already do – squeezing value out of L-Band even while they decide whether to take the bigger bet on Ku or Ka-band VSAT. And if rumours going around Hamburg that one big and well-known SP is indeed up for sale are correct, the evidence is that change is already observable.

And if the market pre-GX was tough, the market after could be tougher still. As DPs, SPs and OEMs sign up to the SEP and GX and accept everything that goes with that, the mid-size players, or simply those not fleet enough of foot, will be left to scrap it out even as the big boys pull further away.

For the Marlinks of this world, that may be less of a problem as they are hedged across all the products as are others, so customers can order a la carte or table d’hôte.

It was said once again in Hamburg that the IT department needs to get out from behind their desks and understand more clearly what is happening in chartering and operations.

As Pietro Amorusi of D’Amico noted, “Shipowners don’t want to take care of solutions, they want to forget about problems. When you go to buy a drill, what you really need is a hole – this should be the approach.”

And that goes the other way. DPs and SPs should be on their customers like glue, talking about the future, describing scenarios and laying out options.

They will still have a hard job. Inmarsat’s direct sales strategy is increasing pricing pressure but the other DPs and SPs are at it too. Inmarsat Maritime President Frank Coles told the audience he expected some kind of consolidation over the next couple of years and that he didn’t think there would be any ‘unlimited’ bandwidth packages on offer in maritime in future if demand continued to increase.

Zeev Steinluaf from Station711 said he could see the day when the majority of crew access was free at point of use, either subsidised by the owner, the DP/SP or supported by advertising.

So the trick of it, just as in the shipping piece itself, is relationships. What the L-Band DPs and SPs have that the VSAT vendors don’t by and large is the relationships – in some cases built up over years. The VSAT vendors can talk service speed and capacity, but you wonder sometimes if they are as close to the market as they claim.

Still, another DS done and we have reasonable clarity on what we might expect over the next year and into 2014 by which time we will have a first glimpse of what GX might be capable of. All shipowners and managers have to do know is call with great accuracy the timing and extent of the market’s recovery in their particular sector and we are home and dry…

Marine Money is an orthodox institution in an unholy sea of maritime conferences. It does money and ships and aside from the occasional diversion into the underlying markets, it sticks to this self-imposed philosophy.

So it’s a sign of the times perhaps that the recent London Forum, always one of the most interesting of its events, encompassed not just the freight market and lending landscape but ended by going completely off message. Pleasingly, this diversion was into an area of interest outside finance – the image of shipping.

Perhaps this time, the great and the good had decided that it was an issue to important to ignore. If a panel comprising Roberto Giorgi of V.Ships, Philippe Louis-Dreyfus of Louis Dreyfus Armateurs, Robert Bugbee of Scorpio Tankers, Rajaish Bajpaee of Bernhard Schulte and Dagfinn Lunde of DVB Bank couldn’t sort this out then who could?

I suspect that to many of the wheelers and dealers present, these were unfamiliar arguments and all the better for it. For those of us who had, optimism might crudely be said to extend as far as the gangway.

Rajaish Bajpaee fondly recalled the feeling many years ago of “seeing oneself in a white uniform, with a cap and epaulettes, off to see the world. But I was 16 years old and the world has changed. I don’t think people go to sea for its charm or to see the world or to wear a uniform”.

As recently as the 1960s and 70s, he said, the best of breed might choose to go to sea. Today, shipping wouldn’t even appear on a list of options. “The sad fact is that those who have no other choice look to ship as a career.”

Shipping would be unable to attract the best and brightest as long as issues such as criminalisation, piracy and the isolation were not remedied. Some of the changes are structural – a week to cross the Pacific rather than a month, port stays of 8-10 hours rather than days. Ever smaller crews feel a greater burden of paperwork, by his estimates 80% of a senior officer’s time is taken up on paperwork, 20% on running and maintaining the ship. Not even the lenders should be happy to hear that.

“There is no real representation of seafarers. We take them for granted at a conference like this, we hear about the best yard, the best bank. The real act of transporting cargo safely is done by a seafarer,” he added.

Roberto Giorgi was quick to agree – and in typically forceful style.

“We have to re-establish respect, dignity and pride in this job. Seafarers should be accorded the same respect as airline pilots, not treated with hostility as if they were terrorists. Without crew there are no bankers, no private equity, no ships and we would all starve to death!”

While the other half of the world froze, of course. This prompted an observation from Citibank’s Michael Parker, the panel’s unofficial sixth member. In his reasoned style, Parker wondered why such an important industry, one which only a few years ago was making huge profits, put no effort into improving its image, lobbying politicians and regulators while it had the cash on hand.

“We have ended up in weakened position where financing of shipping is made harder by regulators with no understanding of the industry. Can the industry have a greater say next time you are earning all that money,” he asked.

Philippe Louis-Dreyfus, himself a former banker before joining the family firm, called this “a good and a fundamental question”. He noted that in his time as chair of national and international ship owner associations, he urged members to spend as much money as possible to improve shipping’s image and let the public know how much good was being done.

“To be frank I wasn’t followed. No one wanted to spend money,” he said. “It should have been the main topic and now we pay every day for our bad image. We have created these problems when we should have been dealing with them as a priority. Most industry bodies have not proactive enough on environmental issues. We have lost time and politicians are making decisions for us.”

It’s a pretty damning assessment, but there was another to come from Scorpio’s Robert Bugbee and it underscores what I have tended to believe will always undermine the attempt at a group hug. If shipping is a zero sum game, why should its constituency play nicely?

“We strongly support crew safety and environmental protection and that starts with design of ships and working with our people. But I think we are destined to repeat our errors because it’s just not a team sport. We are all very motivated to make money when things are good and scramble to get out when they are bad.”

Quoting his wife’s description of shipping as “boys playing with their toys” he said it was precisely that exciting, volatile nature that would attract the mavericks, movers and shakers that make shipping what it is.

“Frankly I’m really all for more regulations and barriers to entry and I’m all for cycles because that’s where the opportunity is and where the fun is. It would be really boring if we created a ‘proper’ industry where everything was nice and rational. I would be out in two seconds.”

I don’t think Bugbee was being purposely cynical, just reflecting what he, his management, board, shareholders and staff are in it for. Doyen of the ship lenders and former INTERTANKO head Dagfinn Lunde of DVB Bank proffered a terrible statistic.

“Some 86% of the money in shipping is private and with a few notable exceptions, there is no will to put any of it into working on the image of shipping or education. The will is not there and the money is not there. Even between industry organisations, the will is sometimes not there,” he said.

Giorgi agreed that there was too much fragmentation and too little alignment between shipping organisations but there were possibilities. The book which gave its name to the conference session – Dynasties of the Sea – could be a useful tool to educate people who had no idea that most of what they consume comes by sea.

For Giorgi, the rot went deeper. A lack of common purpose meant shipping – and shipmanagers in particular – found themselves dictated to on ship and equipment design, making training and the retention of quality crew harder and harder.

It was refreshing to hear a panel not preaching to the converted but to an audience that has probably not heard these issues aired so frequently. As Rajaish Bajpaee pointed out, shipping has spent too long looking inward while not reaching the man on the street.

“Ask a taxi driver in Hong Kong where the gas for his cab comes from and he won’t know. Ask him the gold price or the stock exchange or which horse just won at Happy Valley and he knows. Shipping lacks that identity and we need to reach out to non-shipping community and make them understand how shipping touches their everyday life.”

I should declare an interest immediately and say that DigitalShip has invited me to chair day two of the conference so I expect to picking up some body parts. But apart from packing my thermals to prepare me for the bitter winds that apparently blow through the Magnushall, what else should we expect?

Well, we know that Inmarsat Maritime CEO Frank Coles will be there but his nemesis Alan Gottleib will not be, though it would be foolish to write off some interventions from his mischief-making comrades at KVH.

And for anyone who still doubts it, we will hear again that Inmarsat is a (very) commercial provider of satcoms to maritime, aero and land mobile markets. Its decision to raise prices on E&E and PAYG services represents a desire to improve earnings and so reward shareholders for whom shipping is another commodity business among many.

It may piss people off – and it has – but anyone that calls Inmarsat a monopoly in this era of choice and competition is missing the point. Inmarsat has been called many things: the biggest player in the market, certainly; the best-looking girl at the dance, perhaps; but the fact is that it operates a network that enables users to connect globally and at prices which are readily and transparently available from their re-sellers.

Is it throttling smaller customers? So its detractors claim. But the fact is that DPs and SPs (and not just Stratos) continue to offer small MB packages for owners that prefer to work that way. What confuses me (and perhaps owners too) is that Inmarsat is accused of removing small data plans by the same people who also want to upsell them to large data bundles.

Are Inmarsat’s motives hidden? Does it plan to corner both the airtime market and that for applications as has been suggested elsewhere this week? It’s possible, but I think doubtful. If nothing else, Inmarsat understands its place in the satcoms universe.

It could even be said that the amount of attention Frank Coles has drawn to the spoutings of KVH and others on LinkedIn overstates their importance. Preaching to the choir, like picking one’s nose, generates limited returns.

And besides, there are too many competing options to allow for complacency.

When I covered Inmarsat for Lloyd’s List in the 2000s, just as VSAT was starting to nibble away at the edges of L-Band, Inmarsat was a more timid beast, fearful of being assertive and risk backlash and censure. The competition liked that because it gave them room for manoeuvre.

What we have now is the opposite – a confident company with a strategy which is less focussed on chasing road warriors than it is serving a core maritime demographic. Does that piss off the competition and its consultants? Of course.

So what to expect next week? A bullish defence from Inmarsat for sure, but will we see an insurrection from users? The evidence suggests not. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for and that doesn’t mean that prices stay the same for ever.

In a couple of weeks hence, Coles meets Gottleib at the rather more commercial ACI satcoms event and perhaps there we will see (self-styled) David take on Goliath.

But I still wonder what the core takeaway message will be from both events. I think it is this. Users do have choice and they also have dollars, if fewer to spare than once they did. To focus on cost above value without any reference to the bigger picture is to miss a gaping opportunity.

But there is change already apparent.

After all, at DS Athens, it was the IT departments who came forward to say that they needed to work more closely with the ops and chartering department, to break out of their silos and upsell the opportunity that better communications presents.

It seems to me that regardless of the channel they use, grasping the opportunity to save costs and drive efficiencies is more profitable than simply comparing competing offers. Quality of service, reliability and coverage should be the determining factors.

And from a quick glance at the programme for next week it becomes clear that the industry is already grasping the opportunities that better communications presents. Airtime providers should do themselves a favour and focus on their customers rather than each other.