The Most Common Complaint at Sea Today

Diversity ranks pretty high on the list of complaints I often see from our sailors, but without question, the number one complaint I see from officers and enlisted alike is the lack of bandwidth available while at sea. With that in mind, this is a step in the right direction.

The U.S. Navy has begun buying the next-generation commercial satellite communications terminals to augment its Military Satellite Communications, representing a potential tenfold increase in at-sea data throughput.

Navy ships currently use Inmarsat B HSD, which delivers 128 kilobits per second, or Commercial Wideband Satcom Program (CWSP) at 2.048 megabits per second. The new Commercial Broadband Satellite Program (CBSP) is expected to multiply that capability, delivering 881 kbps for Small Ship Variant (SSV)-equipped ships to 21.6 mbps for Force Level Variant (FLV)-equipped ships.

Not a solution, and we recognize this has a limited impact, but this is a big step in the right direction. Bandwidth seems like such a trivial thing to those of us who only know broadband, but if you put a piece of paper and pen in front of any sailor at sea longer than a few weeks and ask them to write why they wish they had more bandwidth for, they would fill that piece of paper with reasons. This is the path towards audio, video, and other high bandwidth content. Who knows, maybe this is how to put more blogs on ship, perhaps a photo or video blog?

Another nice aspect of this technology is that it can is enabling and scalable to smaller platforms.