Training apps call for fatter pipes

摘要

The maritime sat-coms industry has long sought a 'killer app', which would drive up demand for its services, and hopefully increase customer yield. The problem has been that virtually all contemporary applications designed for use at sea have their roots in the narrowband era. They were built to operate on links as small as 9.6 Kbps, dial-up services. Indeed this has led to some ingenious software engineering and should be commended. Maintenance planning systems come with clever synchronising that only sends changes to the central database. Condition monitoring systems do most of their number crunching onboard resulting in much smaller datasets. A ship can hold a global portfolio of electronic charts, requiring only small transaction between their chart distributor to gain the necessary licence to unlock and use the pre-loaded chart.