Omnipotent and always connected. Ready to tweet from the middle of the Atlantic as deep in the Amazon, Homo Connecticus version 2020 has made itself dependent, both on board and ashore, on communication tools whose primary vocation is and has always been the safety of the sailor and his boat. Receiving an email anywhere nowadays seems as natural as breathing or reading. However, let's take a look at the communication solutions available on board, their costs, limitations and uses.
While VHF remains the default regulatory rule and equipment (with its fixed or portable variants depending on the distance from the coast) for alerting the rescue services or staying in contact with the coast, mobile telephony as a whole has made enormous progress, both in terms of coverage and in terms of ease of use or availability of terminals.
Three satellite solutions now share our sky:
- Inmarsat
- Iridium
- Thuraya
Inmarsat, heterogeneous data solutions
Probably the oldest satellite telephony solution deployed, Inmarsat is a British company that offers telecommunication services to mobile phones (boats, planes...) on almost the entire globe, except for the poles. Like the GSM network, you need an Inmarsat compatible terminal and a SIM (Subscriber Identification Module) card. A subscription with an operator is required to obtain a telephone number and to make calls.
Depending on the frequency bands used (KA, L ...) the data rate can be up to 5 mb upload (50 mb download) per second. In more domestic modes, however, the data rate will reach 500 kbps.
Whether it's a stationary modem or a mobile phone, Inmarsat requires the chosen satellite to be pointed at all times to maintain active and quality communication, which is virtually impossible at sea without satellite dish stabilization equipment.
The rental of a basic Inmarsat terminal costs around 20 euros per day, to which should be added the purchase of the SIM card (count around 30 euros) and the consumption of the telephone units (per minute, depending on the service and destination requested). The purchase of a terminal ( isatphone 2 ), it costs around 800 euros, often offered as a pack including the terminal, the SIM card and a credit of units.
A 10-minute call per inmarsat to France will cost you between 11 and 17 euros, depending on the type of prepaid package you choose.
The reception of a grib via inmarsat will cost you from 7.28 euros to 24.40 euros. Indeed, the minimum billing is 50 Kb, i.e. about ten files at a time. In this case, you might as well couple the maximum number of files to be received in a single session!
Below are the rates for calls over the Inmarsat network, using the only existing Inmarsat phone, the Isatphone 2
Iridium, the reference is paying for itself
Today, Iridium tends to be the reference system for telephone communications at sea. Founded in the 1990s, this telecommunications solution offers the advantage of worldwide coverage, including the poles, and easy-to-use terminals. Here too, the operating principle remains based on the terminal pair and SIM card, to which time or unit credit must be added to make and receive calls.
Iridium allows data transfer at low speed (2.4 bps), impossible to watch a video or listen to music, but sufficient for the recovery of grib files for example.
The major quality of Iridium lies in the possibility of operating the terminal without pointing or aiming, as any mobile phone would be used. It is therefore ideal at sea where the swell and the movements of the ship will have no impact on the quality of the conversation.
The rental of an iridium terminal costs about a hundred euros per week, to which must be added the purchase of the SIM card (count about thirty euros.) and the consumption of the telephone units (per minute, depending on the service and destination requested). The purchase of a terminal costs around 1,200 euros for a mid-range terminal, often offered as a pack including the terminal, SIM card and a credit of units. Note the well-known Iridium GO, popular with boaters, which offers a wifi access point on board, giving you the possibility of using your usual phone (android as an iphone) to make calls, just like at home, via the appropriate application to be installed on the terminal. Two mobile terminals are available on 9555 and the 9575 This last one proposes, in particular, a gps, an SOS function ...
A 10-minute call to France from an Iridium terminal will cost you between 10 euros and 21 euros, depending on the type of prepaid plan you choose. Note that the company iTabNav ( we were telling you about here ) offers unlimited data transfer packages that include a choice of 50 or 150 minutes of communication time.
A land call to iridium will cost you more than 5 euros per minute, charged by your usual operator. To minimize this cost, Iridium has deployed a gateway located in the United States. You dial the number of this gateway from your usual operator (and thus take advantage of the sometimes free calls to the United States) and the recipient of the call will only pay for an iridium to iridium call, at about 1 euro per minute.
The reception of a grib via Iridium will cost you from 4.80 euros to 12.20 euros. At Iridium, excluding unlimited data packages, data consumption is counted in 20-second increments, with a base of 60 units per minute. Our calculation therefore considered 30 seconds to recover a 5 Kb file.
Thuraya, a complex billing
Thuraya is the newest of the satellite telecommunications operators. The Thuraya nebula is based on 2 geostationary satellites, Thuraya-2 for the EMEA area, Thuraya-3 for the APA area. Attention, the americas zone (Antilles, Cuba ...) is not covered at all, as well as the poles... Thuraya terminals have dual satellite and GSM capability, which means that, if correctly configured, the phone will automatically choose the best performing network when needed. Disadvantage of this feature is that one of the networks (GSM or sat) will necessarily be roaming in relation to the other, so you must check, prior to use, the possible roaming costs applicable to your subscription.
The Emirati operator's network offers a data rate of 9.6 kbps, which is more than sufficient for email and light navigation and, even more so, for taking weather forecasts using grib files.
As with iridium, there is no need to point the terminal at the chosen satellite, as they are all equipped with omnidirectional antennas.
A Thuraya terminal sells for around 900 euros. The operator's invoicing is quite complex, whether it is a subscription or prepaid formula, the rate will of course depend on the destination of the call (3 tariff bands) and also on the prepaid package available to the subscriber. The Thuraya X5 offers a data rate of up to 60 kb/s and works just like your regular phone under android. Very useful, its double sim allows you to use it on land on the mobile phone network at sea (or on land too) on the thuraya satellite network. Finally, the X5 is protected ip 66.
A 10-minute call to France will cost between US$9 and US$17.
The reception of a grib via Iridium will cost you 0.25 US$. At Thuraya, the Megabyte of data is charged 5 US$ with an increment of 0.01 Megabyte.
Which solution to choose?
If the possibility to call and receive data from any point in the world is an undeniable advantage, taking advantage of the disconnection of the yacht will undoubtedly bring you great satisfaction, especially since an abuse of these possibilities could quickly cost you a lot of money!
Although operators are now offering solutions that provide excellent quality of communication and transfer rates suitable for use at sea, it is nevertheless not possible at present to have a comfortable and high quality Internet connection at sea comparable to that available at home unless one has a very large budget.
It is important, before boarding, to budget for the telecommunications station, because communications costs can skyrocket if we do not take care to dialogue effectively. We therefore recommend that you first define a frequency and duration of calls and draw a traffic forecast from this, in order to adopt the offer or package best suited to your needs, in the choice imposed by your navigation zone.
Some Tips for Satellite Telephony
We spoke with Mickael Da Silva, IEC Telecom's Sales Manager. He explains to us " there is no such thing as a perfect, universal solution. The yachtsman will need to know his destination and his sailing area to choose one of the 3 operators according to the coverage area of each one. "
About the Internet on board, he explains " It is not possible to surf like at home when you are at sea, at least for a budget accessible to a yachtsman. Solutions exist for high or even very high speed access, but the prices of both the equipment and the corresponding subscriptions are very high, several thousand euros just for the equipment. "And he adds" We provide all our customers with software of our own design, Optiaccess which is in charge of optimizing the data traffic that will be carried out, by strongly compressing email traffic in particular. "Technically" it should be borne in mind that all Internet data exchanges will be carried out by e-mail, the smtp and pop protocols allowing easy connection resumption, all exchanges being carried out in text mode, the attachments are encoded and served as text as well. "he explains.
He adds " I recommend boaters to check their consumer credit regularly and to know the expiry dates of their SIM cards. Iridium charges several hundred euros to reactivate a card that has not been recharged. "
In this regard, Mr. Da Silva gives us this information:
To check your credit, with Iridium, send an empty sms to 2888, the SIM card has a life without reload of 270 days after expiration of the credit. On the thuraya side call 150. The SIM card has a short life of 3 months. Finally, on the Inmarsat side call *106#. Good news, Inmarsat SIM cards have no end of life.
