Ship Equip, a maritime VSAT communications provider, announced an important landmark of 1,000 operational VSAT systems. This achievement also coincides with the start of the first XpressLink deliveries. XpressLink is a managed service with VSAT and FleetBroadband communication in one integrated package, acting as a bridge to the Global Xpress satellite communication services planned for launch by Ship Equip’s owner Inmarsat in 2013. The flat fee XpressLink service delivers 512 Kbps/512 Kbps with a minimum average data rate of 128 Kbps.
“As the acceptance of VSAT caught on, we took a decision to plan for large numbers of customers”, COO Esben Flo says. “The only way to do that was to simplify and standardize the product, while allowing for customization in the setup.” This has been solved by putting all the electronics into a 5 unit rack, with a 12” colour touch screen as interface, and standardizing on one stabilized antenna. As sales increased this turned out to be a key strategy to handle the increase in installation volume. “When the majority of our orders contain the same components it is much easier to scale the volume quickly. The remaining challenge then to achieve a successful delivery is to get access to the ship in a port”, Mr Flo says.
CEO Ivar Nesset adds: “Based on external market reports, we estimate that around 10% of the market has already installed VSAT, and we see that sales continue to increase. This trend is reinforced by our introduction of XpressLink, with higher data speeds at lower prices. With this new offering we continue to streamline our product to make it easy to use, easy to deliver, customer friendly and with satellite redundancy. We are well positioned to handle the market growth.”