Representative deployment — an illustrative composite of real deployment patterns.
Situation
An offshore survey and support operator running four vessels (55–85 m) on
energy-sector campaigns. Each campaign generates multi-terabyte multibeam and ROV
datasets; clients increasingly score “redundant multi-orbit connectivity” in RFPs
and write uptime into contracts. Data historically came ashore by hard drive at
port calls; shore-side processing teams sat idle for days waiting on it. Day-rate
context: a vessel standing by costs $40,000–$90,000/day.
The old-way cost
- 4× VSAT contracts, 6 Mbps CIR each: $7,500/month/vessel → $360,000/year fleet-wide
($1,250/Mbps/mo) - Data offload: physically shipped drives; 3–6 day latency from acquisition
to processing; at 6 Mbps a 1 TB set would have taken ~15 days to transmit - Two weather-extended port calls in one year attributable to data logistics:
~$260,000 of vessel time - Crew internet poor enough to appear in exit interviews; replacement cost
$5k–$15k per seafarer - Status-quo run rate: ~$620,000/year including data-logistics losses
The solution
Fleet standardization on West Networks Maritime kits:
- 3× smaller hulls: Maritime 10G Kit
— 4× Starlink + OneWeb + dual 5G on a
Balance SDX Pro core - 1× flagship survey vessel: Maritime 40G Kit
— 18× Starlink + 2× OneWeb + 4× 5G on dual redundant
EPX cores - SpeedFusion
policies: survey-data offload as scheduled bulk class; ROV/telemedicine links
on smoothed priority paths; crew welfare guaranteed a bandwidth floor - Fleet-wide single dashboard; West Networks NOC monitoring with per-path alerting
- VSAT retained on the flagship only, as a bonded backstop until contract expiry
Investment: ~$220,000 one-time fleet-wide + ~$26,000/month pooled service.
Results
- Flagship measured throughput: 3.4 Gbps down / 510 Mbps up; smaller hulls
650–880 Mbps down - 1 TB survey dataset offloaded in ~4.5 hours from the work site (vs 3–6 days
via port call, or a theoretical 15-day VSAT transfer) — shore processing now
starts the same day acquisition ends - Two port calls eliminated in the first campaign season ≈ $180,000 of vessel
time recovered — more than the flagship kit’s cost, from data logistics alone - Client RFP scoring: operator now bids “dual-constellation, 20+ path bonded
connectivity, NOC-monitored” — cited in winning a 2-year framework agreement - Connectivity uptime across the fleet year: 100% vessel-level (SpeedFusion
absorbed every per-path event, including one full-day OneWeb terminal fault on
a 10G hull — traffic re-balanced, mission unaffected) - Fleet connectivity spend: ~$530k year one (hardware included) vs ~$620k
status-quo run rate — cheaper in year one at ~150× the bandwidth — and a
~$312k/year run rate thereafter vs $620k → ~$310k/year saved from year two - Crew Wi-Fi went from exit-interview complaint to recruiting line
Pull-quote for site: “We used to plan campaigns around getting drives ashore.
Now the data beats the vessel home.” — Offshore Operations Manager (composite)