Should paying for broadband feel like gambling?

Somewhere, a superintendent is probably getting ripped off, big-time, right now. Know your broadband usage.

By Ryan Skinner (email)

So Telaurus' PR guy, Neville Smith, got in touch and gave me this little jewel:

Shipping companies are lining up to move to Inmarsat FleetBroadband and Vsat with little or no idea of the cost implications and no clue how to handle the traffic. Their first bill usually lets them know that streaming internet radio to the bridge and allowing the crew to surf the web are bad ideas.

That kind of thing says "juicy" to me, so I called him and Telaurus on it. I wanted to hear their nasty stories. What are we talking about when we say first bill? How big? How ugly? And they were nice enough to comply.

Consider the training vessel that racked up a $110,000 broadband bill in 45 hours. How'd it happen? The ship had a number of PCs for training purposes and each one started doing windows updates. Their bandwidth was saturated for the whole period.

Or how about this: One company installed a fleet broadband system, but didn't touch it. Literally, they didn't touch it. They were waiting for some software to install on it before using it. But it was plugged in. And, like the training ship, the thing started downloading patches and updates to Windows. One month: $38,000 broadband bill. Ouch.

Gregor Ross of Telaurus tells me that these stories are over a year old, and that broadband distributors have wised up to this risk. Now shore-side firewalls stop this traffic, but not, says Ross, before the ships' PCs query the shore-side server, again eating up broadband capacity. He says Telaurus, determined to stop this kind of thing, has set up firewalls on shore, and on the ship, in the software and hardware ends.

The reason they've focused so harshly on the issue is, he says, that they've got a different business model than other suppliers: They charge only for the traffic that they move, and the traffic the manager wants. If the connection goes haywire, it's Telaurus' risk. That'll make any supplier more attentive.

Unfortunately, the way fleet broadband is packaged by many vendors creates the sticker shock. The minimum data package sent from ship to shore is 100 kb (a set price), and then you'll pay more in 10 kb intervals. But many simple text emails are less than a kilobyte. So, if you send 30 1-kilobyte messages, you'll pay for 3 MB, not 30 kilobytes.

Here's Ross's and Telaurus' three tips for shore managers to cut their broadband bill:

1) Check your firewalls, on shore and on the ship.

2) Make sure the package you buy fits your traffic needs. Buyers are accustomed to buying minutes, not MB. They don't know how much data they transmit. So when someone offers a deal that cuts your bill for 100 MB per month, you go for it (even though you only really need 6-7 MB per month).

3) Manage your expectations. Broadband prices have tumbled, but you're going to struggle to find anyone who'll sell you broadband for less than $4-5 per MB in the near future. So downloading those football result tables with images (6-7 MB) is still going to cost you plenty. Don't touch it, unless you know what it costs.

 

Comments

[Bill Peabody]

they should go to this
http://www.commercialcommunicationsinc/products/claas.html