The Comforts of Home
Internet Onboard
BY ANDY ADAMS
It used to be that “all the comforts of home” meant an easy chair, your pipe and the newspaper.
Today, the easy chair is an office chair and the
pipe is gone. The poor old paper newspaper has
been replaced with an electronic version that carries pretty much all the same stories, plus streaming video, the ability to search, cut ’n’ paste things
you want to keep and stories
that you can forward to
friends and colleagues.
The ads used to
subsidize the 10
cents an issue you
paid the paperboy.
Now, the ads are all but invisible (or you close them the instant
they open) and the newspaper publisher is going broke sending you free news. It’s a strange world!
Instead, you are paying the money yourself and directly!
You pay for connectivity and bandwidth and 10 cents will
now barely buy you a cryptic email – forget about what it costs
to download a chart at sea. But, people want this and will pay
handsomely for it.
To be fair though, sea-going Internet is dropping in price
and rising in performance. To help guide us through the maze
of technology (that your best marina customers seem to
understand embarrassingly well), we contacted Ken Harrison
at Summerhill CA Sales. “Can you please simplify this a bit?”
we asked.
Intellian S60: VSAT antennas like this Intellian S60 and others from KVH and SeaTel are as small as 24”. Users can
buy a fixed rate plan and they can choose from different
speeds for both up and downloading and voice calls over
VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol).
Ken decided that the best way to start was to divide the discussion into three segments: good, better, and best.
GOOD
Everyone has a cell phone; now, many people carry a
BlackBerry as they arrive to board their boats. The marina
probably has localized Internet service that a boater can connect to, either for free or by paying a modest fee. The problem
