A more complex, regulated landscape for vessel operators has brought challenges around applications and network security into focus, writes Tore Morten Olsen, president of maritime at Marlink. A survey of the shipping industry 20 years ago would have found ship operators and service providers in an uneasy stalemate. With a virtual monopoly in place, communications limited to safety alerts, barely-affordable voice calls and minimal text messages, there was little appetite for a fight. Slowly, competition to the incumbent Inmarsat emerged, in the form of Iridium’s initial constellation and regional offerings from GlobalStar and Thuraya. Despite some big promises, these services were still far from revolutionary – all were still based on L-band with low throughput– but at least there were alternatives. The first battle of the satellite communications competition had been joined. The battle of the bands Fast forward another five years or so and the next phase broke out. The battle of the bands saw higher bandwidth VSAT services break out from offshore and other high-end markets and begin to make inroads into mainstream commercial shipping markets. Gradually supplanting L-band services as the primary communications channel, VSAT would provide much higher bandwidth and enable the first phase of maritime digitalisation. Soon the providers were expending marketing ammunition over which band was best suited to maritime applications. Since shipowners mostly cared more about buying bunkers and making port times – and increasingly on providing communications to crew – there was a valuable battleground to contest. The frequency on which the services were delivered soon became irrelevant. Not all orbits are equal Five years ago, the next front was opened, as suppliers sought to push the relative benefits of the orbits in which their satellites operated. Should operators stay with geostationary (GEO) VSAT services that could provide a global service but also suffered from service blockages and a lack of polar coverage? Should they get behind the new heavyweight Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) services being offered by new entrants and potentially add capacity in specific regions? Then we saw the emergence of new Low Earth Orbit (LEO) services from Starlink and OneWeb – and Iridium too had by this time launched an upgraded L-band LEO service and would go on to become a rival safety services provider to Inmarsat. Dramatic reductions in latency and increases in throughput speeds disrupted a market that had become used to services that were reliable if not exciting. The result of this change is that, maritime bandwidth and the networks it runs upon, is no longer a limiting factor for the maritime community to enjoy office-like connectivity experiences. Managing change Which brings us to the landscape of today. When land-like connectivity is near to ubiquitous, what is left for the incumbents to fight over? Quite a lot as it turns out. In a market disrupted by geopolitics and supply chain stress, shipowners are engaged with digital strategies that enable them to operate at maximum availability, sharing data with fleet management centres, stakeholders and even regulators, on demand. Putting technology onboard with minimal intervention and limited integration no longer delivers the required level of benefit. Solutions must be managed and networks constructed to reflect the business need. For example, the ability to adopt collaborative workflow software, share cloud