(Originally published July 2024)
Inmarsat has announced the dawn of NexusWave, the new showpiece solution for Inmarsat Maritime’s operations. Before delving into the what, how, when, whether it makes sense, will it work, and whether we should get one, we thought taking a few steps back and some reflection on the company’s past activities would not go amiss.
Presently, deep into the interview stages of his current report, “The Future of Maritime Connectivity – 2024 Edition”, our director of maritime, Joshua Flood, has been speaking to many people within the industry. Here, he discusses new LEO offerings, service providers, hardware vendors, and of course, Inmarsat (now owned by Viasat).
Inmarsat of the Past
Speaking to some maritime satcom industry veterans, they still purr over the introduction of Inmarsat’s Fleetbroadband service, the exhilarating bandwidth speeds of 128 Kbps, MSS, back in 2007, and how incredible they were considered then.
Many will also know that the satellite operator missed the tendering for any GEO VSAT Ku-band spectrum in the 2000s, only managing to secure some Ka-band spectrum in 2010, which started its GX constellation and FX (Fleet Xpress) service much later than its rivals back in 2016. Then, the hullabaloo debates on Ka-band rain fade reigned for years and were considered hot gossip a decade or so ago.
Through acquisitions, Inmarsat Maritime had two legacy Ku-band services, one from Ship Equip and another called XpressLink (Ku-band service). The XpressLink service was at its peak, with between 2,000 and 2,500 vessels during 2014 and 2015. Both were gradually phased out by 2019. Looking back at our data archives, Valour Consultancy reported that the company held around 750 XpressLink vessels in 2018 and around 100 vessels from Ship Equip.
The maritime satellite operator/connectivity service provider has traversed waves of connectivity technology over the decades.
The Challenge
Inmarsat has long considered itself the ruler of the maritime connectivity sphere. Its service platforms have the most commercial vessels and generate the largest revenues from satellite services in the industry, although others may beg to differ in 2023.
With SpaceX’s launch of the Starlink Maritime service, the hierarchy has become hazy. The LEO offering has quickly penetrated the market directly by Starlink or via its resellers and is estimated to account for more than 25% of the VSAT vessels active today. The speed of performance, cost-effective data packages, low-cost, lightweight hardware, and installation convenience have been critical in this fast development.
In summary, bandwidth speeds and equipment costs are the most compelling components.
The Solution: NexusWave
Recently, Inmarsat announced the launch of NexusWave, a managed connectivity service built on a bonded multi-dimensional network that will incorporate Global Xpress (GX) Ka-band, low-earth orbit (LEO) services, and as-available coastal LTE services, backed up by L-band (MSS).
The term “bonded” is interesting. From our understanding, Inmarsat believes the bulk of smart boxes presently used on maritime vessels are typically connectivity link switchers. The box will switch between links for the best result: a primary link, then a secondary, and backup when the first two fail.
NexusWave is a service that runs on all available pipes simultaneously.
For example, a vessel could be getting a downlink of 200 Mbps from Eutelsat OneWeb, 50 Mbps from GX, 50 Mbps from Fleet Reach, and 1 Mbps from FBB or its Elera (new MSS service). The vessel could hypothetically be getting an aggregated 301 Mbps of total downlink.
As we understand, Inmarsat Maritime has been testing a handful of vessels with NexusWave over the last few quarters, benchmarking the performance and customer’s behaviour and usage.
Although not confirmed, we believe Hapag Lloyd was one of the trialling shipping companies.
Presently, Inmarsat Maritime offers Ka-band GX service through Fleet Xpress, with more than 15,000 vessels worldwide subscribing to it. In addition, FBB, FleetOne, and Inmarsat-C services. These aforementioned services amount to more than 100,000 vessels worldwide.
The company also sells LTE connectivity through its Fleet LTE (repackaging Tampnet’s cellular services in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico), and Fleet Reach, a partnership with a global cellular specialist. We believe this to be Vodafone Global Roaming, although this is unconfirmed.
The interesting element in this equation is the inclusion of the LEO service, a new dimension for Inmarsat, delivered through a partnership with Eutelsat OneWeb. The company toyed with starting its own LEO service with a “small number of satellites”, but nothing materialised from those touted assertions. The collaboration with Eutelsat OneWeb is a fascinating piece of this jigsaw.
Two factors should help Inmarsat with its partnership with the French satellite operator.
Number one, Anglo-Franco relationships have never been so strong; the French Rugby Union team regularly beat England in the annual Six Nations tournament, and will likely do so for many years, and the French football team also knocked England out of the Qatar World Cup. Let’s not talk about the 2024 Euros in Germany.
Plus, the Paris Olympics is due to start in August, and it will be claimed after the conclusion that it was much better than London 2012.
Eutelsat’s sporty employees in Paris will most definitely enjoy corresponding with Inmarsat Maritime’s London-based staff.
Another point: when OneWeb was initially started, a good portion of the LEO satellite operators were shaped similarly to Inmarsat, which was good in some ways and bad in others.
For those who need a short update on OneWeb’s LEO network, it consists of 633 satellites, and it is claimed will have 90% global coverage by the middle of 2024, stated Eutelsat recently.
The NexusWave service will commence in September 2024. Presently, only Inmarsat Solutions is set to sell the solution; however, the new service will be open to all its value-added resellers and all its maritime service providers will be given the opportunity to sell the managed added service.
Additionally, Ka-band capacity will come from the ViaSat-3 satellite network, though the managed service will be bundled and provided exclusively by Inmarsat Maritime. However, this won’t come into play until the middle of 2025. Two ViaSat-3 satellite launches are planned later this year and early 2025 respectively, which should deliver a significant upgrade in capacity and speed for the network. More on this point later in the piece.
There are a few other interesting elements to this equation. Customers of the new service will be provided with maritime enterprise-grade firewall security. As with its LEO and cellular services, we believe this is via a partnership with GT Maritime; however, Inmarsat, again, would not confirm this.
Parameters to Success
Pondering how successful the new service will be comes down to five factors: service pricing, performance of the LEO component, equipment costs for solutions, buy-in from the service provider community (resellers), and GEO VSAT differentiators.
On average, a typical monthly service fee for FX ranges from $1,600 to $2,000. NexusWave will have three or four packages, based on maximum speeds but with a CIR element included. The starting package price likely be competitive to a Ku-band and Starlink package, Valour believes roughly $2,500. Package prices will likely range up to $10,000 per month. If, for example, four packages are initially introduced, they will probably be around ~$5,000 and ~$7,500 per month, Valour Consultancy speculates.
The starting price will certainly entice new users, as the biggest differentiator will be that all the packages will be data unlimited unlike Starlink’s current offerings. For example, with a 1TB data package from Starlink, a subscription to an “average” Flex for Ku-band GEO VSAT service, a subscription to Iridium Certus plus support/management fees, a customer would be looking at nearly $3,000, at the least. Then you factor in equipment purchases or leasing it, and the prices increase further. This is one of the key pros for Inmarsat’s new NexusWave. All the equipment costs will be included in the monthly package with no upfront cost.
We believe the biggest uncontrollable factor for NexusWave success is whether Eutelsat OneWeb’s LEO service can match Starlink’s once fully operational globally?
Getting back to the hardware plus point, the LEO antennas from Intellian and Kymeta will be around $10,000 initially; prices will drop in time with economies of scale in production. A bespoke server will be required, $500, cellular antennas and router equipment, $750-$2,500 depending on the configurations. Plus, the GX VSAT antenna is more than all the other elements combined. If our pricing speculations are correct, users will be getting a lot of free hardware kit for a very low price point. Additionally, once Inmarsat Maritime upgrade its service to include ViaSat-3, the hardware will be updated for free to incorporate this new available service.
This certainly becomes very enticing for an end user; however, this connectivity contract period will be at least three years, most probably five years on average. This quandary for shipping customers will be a good weather gauge on the perception – “which is better, short monthly contract terms (something Starlink widely touts) to much longer-term contracts of several years but locked in pricing”?.
One interesting facet of the equipment is the free “Fleet Care”, which will be provided with warranties, repairs where necessary, and maintenance support.
Inmarsat is also keen to emphasise that after trialling the solution, it was noted in prohibited zones of Starlink Maritime, GEO VSAT Ku-band was heavily congested. However, the satellite operator has been able to increase its bandwidth performance to those vessels, in some cases increasing downlink capabilities to 30 Mbps. When ViaSat-3 satellites come along, this will be even more.
Finally, the most crucial matter will be engaging with its resellers. The solution looks very interesting; however, these resellers will have to sign up for big commitments for NexusWave. Combine this with existing commitments to Starlink and past commitments to Inmarsat for FX. Plus, we have an oncoming array of other LEO providers.
How much can these providers really commit to NexusWave?
Next Steps
Thinking about the next few steps, if Inmarsat Maritime launches NexusWave in September 2024, considering the logistical parameters of buying, delivering, and installing equipment on vessels, it will look to have 300-500 vessels active with NexusWave by the end of the year.
We believe the biggest hiccup in this area could be potential equipment production and delivery delays. This new service involves many new equipment components.
Thinking a little further down the track, it will be imperative that Eutelsat OneWeb’s LEO network performance is near or almost on par with Starlink.
Pondering 18 months from now, how will it compare to Kuiper, Rivada, and Telesat?
Conclusion
We think an ambitious gauge of success will be around 3,200 vessels on NexusWave by the end of 2025.
However, if you compare this to Starlink Maritime over the last 24 months, some would likely consider this a failure. We would disagree with this comparison.
Starlink’s tactic, initially, was simply to seed the market with its hardware; Inmarsat Maritime needs to keep profitability at the centre of its operations.
The challenge with measuring success is how you benchmark yourself and what you compare yourself to.
As stated at the beginning, Inmarsat still has a number of legacy services ingrained in the maritime connectivity market. Switching 15,000 FX vessels to NexusWave vessels in 24 months would be impossible.
By the end of 2017 (~18 months after launching FX), Inmarsat had around 2,600 FX vessels; anything above this number would be a reasonable effort. Surpassing 3,000 vessels will be a very good achievement by Inmarsat Maritime. 3,200 vessels will be momentous. However, starting with small steps, we think 500 vessels on the new service by the end of 2024 will be a good accomplishment.
Finally, Inmarsat will also be showing off its new Elera L-band technology. As it looks to migrate its FX customer base to NexusWave, the company also needs to protect its FBB and Fleet One L-band customer base. Iridium’s Certus service has also made remarkable progress of late. It will be interesting to hear more about these developments.
For more information about the maritime connectivity market, please click here for our Maritime Connectivity – 2024 edition report.