Today, I am on the boat and am playing with my newest toy, the "Skipper 150" Inmarsat FleetBroadband Internet terminal. As you can see in the photos, I am downloading iTunes from the Apple web site and have the Panbo web site open on my mini notebook. At the same time, I have been on the phone, calling my mother in Germany, who shared with me all the news of the neighborhood during that 20 minutes phone conversation. The Skipper amazes me. I have had satellite phones on board Bremer Speck for probably 6-7 years. The kind most other cruisers have, i.e. Iridium and Globalstar. I still have the latter mounted on the wall inside the pilothouse and glancing at it right now, this is one of the rare moments, when it has been able to connect to the satellites. Of course, I could never have done with either sat phone, what I am doing right now. I am typing away on my notebook, connected to my on-board WiFi network, editing this blog post live on Blogger, uploading 3 photos of about 4MB in total, while the download on the primary PC has pulled down 60MB of about 74MB during the past 40 minutes. Me thinks.. The "Skipper 150" is a winner!
Did you calculate the cost of that broadband service?
ReplyDeleteA quick google search shows that they charge more than $13.00USD per Mb. So your 74Mb in 40 minutes will cost more than $1,000.00
I routinely exceed that amount of bandwidth on an average day. The fees would be more than $30,000USD per month!
Great technology, but it's DOA, not going to fly...