SeaDream change to SEVSAT

NORWAY: The high end hybrid luxury cruice and yacht company SeaDream has chosen SEVSAT from Ship Equip to provide the increased broadband on their two ships "SeaDream I" and "SeaDream II".

We are pleased that SeaDream chose SEVSAT from Ship Equip Sales Manager Sindre Alnes says, I believe it proves that we have competitive solutions for the Cruise and Yacht market.

The Yacht and Cruise markets contain for a large part high end customers CEO Ivar Nesset states. In that respect they are important to us since they drive product development and competitiveness.

The new SEVSAT solution consist of a 1 Mb SCPC duplex connection for each ship based on the T11N satellite, providing unique Ku-band SCPC coverage across the Mediterranean Sea, Transatlantic and The Caribbean. The broadband connection is used to connect to the internet and to the SeaDream’s land office and in addition it provides bandwidth for the 24 telephone lines as part of the solution. The always on SEVSAT broadband is partly for internet access and partly configured to in an MPLS network for access to company recourses. All in all this is a considerable upgrade from the previous solution which was a C-band VSAT connection of 1 Mb downlink and 512 Kb uplink shared between the two ships to connect to the internet and 12 telephone lines.

The luxury cruise ships have 56 guest Staterooms suitable for hosting 112 passengers. The crew count 95 persons so in all just over 200 people are the potential users of the communication systems. Crew and passenger networks are separated, with the bulk of the capacity dedicated to the passengers whom frequently are business individuals that depend on communication to overlook their businesses even as they are on a relaxing cruise.

To offer a good quality telecommunications service is essential to our business says Kjell Sande, Director of Maritime Operations at SeaDream. It is a key element in providing the ‘peace of mind’ that many our business passengers only get when they know that they can handle business from the cruise ship. The previous solution had shortcomings that made it tough to sell to the guests, it did not provide enough value for money he states. We made the decision to move to Ku band since Ship Equip could offer an integrated service on one satellite with high bandwidth in the areas we sail.

This far our experience with Ship Equip is very good Kjell Sande says. The first installation and the satellite link was brought up while the ship was quayside in Florida by a service engineer from the Ship Equip US office. He also helped sort out a related issue to complete the installation quickly and swiftly. The second ship was installed by another engineer and equally professional. All in all we are very happy with the way things were handled the Operations Director says.

We are happy that our highly qualified engineers are performing well Sales Manager Mr. Sindre Alnes says. Also, he explains: - the state of the art hardware package and the pre-integrated and tested equipment that Ship Equip use are contributing to a trouble free installation.

Both ships are now prepared for the Mediterranean season which for the most part is fully booked, and will journey across on 25 th and 28 th of April respectively.

The journey over to Europe is a scheduled cruise with paying passengers says Mr. Sande, and we are very excited and look forward to experiencing the SEVSAT broadband on this first Atlantic crossing with the new system up and running.

Ship Equip Welcomes Cruise customers

We are happy to serve the cruise market CEO Ivar Nesset says commenting on the recent contract with SeaDream. Our business model is based on creating a ‘one size fits all’ type of service, which implies that everyone is welcome as a customer and will fit our business model since we can easily scale the service to the vessels need. Previously there was a large gap between what a cruise vessel needed and what an offshore supply vessel or merchant ship needed. Lately this gap has narrowed considerably and there is not a lot of difference any more, meaning our maritime VSAT product SEVSAT now fits even better with the needs of cruise vessels which the contract with SeaDream clearly shows.

I think we will see a lot more contracts like this in the future Mr. Nesset says. The maritime VSAT market has been growing fast and some segments more so than others. The cruise segment was early to embrace VSAT technology because of their urgent need to resell bandwidth to guests and their predictable sailing pattern. This was attractive customer accounts bringing in top dollars for the providers. A few years back there were only a few maritime communications companies that could offer this kind of service to the cruise market, leaving them with a very limited choice. Also the technology was under development so you could see typically that deliveries included an ‘on board service person’ with the obvious added cost. This cost was justified through the potential downside of having thousands of revenue generating passengers left without a connection. Now that more providers offer good quality products and the technology is more mature, you no longer need to babysit the installation. As a result I think we will see a lot more cruise vessels shopping around for good deals Mr. Nesset concludes.

The SeaDream contract is based on mainly using the T11N satellite covering the key sailing areas of cruise ships: The Caribbean Ocean, The Atlantic and the Mediterranean Ocean. Ship Equip has bought close to 10% of the capacity on this satellite leaving plenty of capacity available for high bandwidth customers.

About:

SHIP EQUIP GROUP is the fastest growing maritime broadband provider worldwide. The C-band or Ku-band solution SEVSAT and TVRO from Ship Equip give ships cost efficient solutions for internet, telephony and television. We have installed more than 2200 stabilized antennas all over the world, and have extensive experience in supporting our equipment in demanding maritime conditions.

The head office is situated in Ålesund, Norway with offices in Oslo, Houston, Seattle, Singapore, London and Reykjavik.