DOF Extends VSAT Contract with Marlink
Ongoing service development and customer support help secure new five year deal for entire fleet
DOF Group has renewed its VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) services contract with Marlink for five more years, with options to further extend the services. Under the new contract announced at Nor-Shipping 2015, Marlink will provide customized VSAT services to 60 DOF owned offshore and subsea vessels, counting an additional eight vessels on the previous contract, including several imminent newbuilds.
As an international group of companies, DOF owns and operates a modern fleet of supply and subsea vessels, offering a strong engineering capacity to service the global offshore energy market. Marlink’s continuous service development, which in addition to technical enhancements includes improved global support, enables vessel owners such as DOF to provide reliable connectivity to clients.
Marlink currently meets DOF’s fleet-wide connectivity requirements, using both dedicated and shared bandwidth services according to specific vessel needs. Marlink and DOF are currently monitoring the throughput performance of the vessels using the iDirect shared platform and so far the experience is that vessels receive more throughput on a shared service. It is expected that most of fleet will move to the iDirect platform, to improve DOF’s overall bandwidth requirements.
“We are keen to continuously improve our support by developing the best solution for each vessel and the fleet going forward,” said Gunhild Moen, Director Key Accounts, Marlink. “Our goal is to deliver the best cost vs bandwidth return on investment, whilst ensuring access to advanced features such as the ability to dynamically increase bandwidth, so DOF can demonstrate flexibility towards clients that may have changing communication needs for specific projects.”
“Marlink’s VSAT services have proven to be highly beneficial to our own and our clients’ operations,” said Tor Skeie, CEO Marin IT, the IT service provider for the DOF Group. “With reliable communication on board, we are able to operate smarter and more efficiently, whilst being confident in a stable, available link. We are so far pleased with the extra throughput achieved over a shared platform which has made us more cost efficient in our operations and the extra bandwidth is much appreciated by our crew.”
