I mean, besides providing better connectivity for people on ships, what will/can change?
What was blocked in building out by current satellite offerings?
On cruise lines at least, internet is extremely expensive and slow. Like $80/gb. Starlink would be awesome (Assuming it will be safe to go on cruises in the future...).
There’s a surprising amount of real time route optimization that in theory could improve efficiency and cost by a few percent by taking current and weather into account.
Weather routing is already prevalent over existing satphone connections. The GFS model that is typically used for this purpose has low enough resolution that there's marginal returns to additional bandwidth or reduced latency.
You can interpolate the GFS very accurately in terms of wind over land and close to land with WRF-ARW. There is highish resolution land use data and good elevation models. This is something you can do on your laptop even these days.
However I have no idea of good it is at wave and currents.
You can also get real time data via ham radio although it’s extremely slow. It still works for navigation adjustments and optimizations. I fail to see how this is relevant beyond crew morale.
Well, routing seems like something that needs just ship position. You can easily send that over, for example, iridium network and as long as you won't try doing that 10 times per second (because why?) if savings were actually that big, it could already be done, even many years ago
Most vessels will have some form of connectivity on board right now. It depends on their vicinity to coast.
Right now data sizes of an email are industry standard. As you go into 100s of Mb you start to see people really struggle.
I would look at BIM systems for a parallel with ships.
Ships are incredibly complicated and often self reliant. Shore based monitoring is hated by the crew but vessel operators see return from it.
A simple example would be an extension of the IoT devices already on board probably around engines. Anything with tangible benefits to Efficiency and safety would see investment.
Tracking the status of your cargo. At the moment you always have uncertainity during the voyage - you don't know if e.g. temperature was held consistently until you took control of the cargo after arrival, or if it was tampered with during transit in any way.
For fleet owners, no matter if for ships, cars/trucks or planes, management becomes way easier if they have global high bandwidth data uplink: you can detect stuff like engine or other part wear early by running big data analysis on telemetry, and in disaster case you have way better logs to operate on (both post mortem and during troubleshooting).
This by the way also is relevant for car manufacturers - with the exception of Tesla, the only way classic car manufacturers get information on how their cars are used in the real world comes from test drivers, accident reports and shop visits. Consistent data uplinks allow for a lot more telemetry that can be used to improve their products.
Surprisingly, even scientists can benefit from this - have ships transmit real-time data about air pressure, sunlight, wave height etc. and suddenly you have a global network of floating data buoys.
> temperature was held consistently until you took control of the cargo after arrival, or if it was tampered with during transit in any way.
There are already temperature and tamper devices for sensitive freight. There are devices that will show if orientation has changed or if shock occurred etc.
Sensitive freight is an entire industry that has already innovated around the lack of connectivity.
That's not to say there isn't further innovation to be made.
> There are already temperature and tamper devices for sensitive freight. There are devices that will show if orientation has changed or if shock occurred etc.
Tiltguard stickers or how were they called... about the most useless bullshit I've seen. Back when I worked in stage lighting, many cases had these affixed... and you can guess what every shift leader had in their pocket: yep, a load of replacement ones.