Internet at sea
- Thread starter michty_me
- Start date
I've worked away from home for a few years and mostly had terrible connection to back home.
Looks like this new place is a little different...
The download is probably taking a hit as there are a few hundred people around at the minute.
Where abouts in the sea?
Are you on an oil rig?
Yeah, I'm about 100 miles east of Shetland. Probably near the Norwegian waters.
That’s extraordinarily fast for a marine service. They might be using a 60GHz link from shore. Or more likely they might be using a cache. One of my old contracts was providing satellite broadband to ships carrying ‘contractors’ in the Gulf of Aden. These were basically floating hotels and bandwidth was VERY expensive so we racked up large QNAP NAS units and cached terabytes of ‘data’ which was mainly movies involving young people with very few clothes on entertaining one another. That gave the ‘contractors’ what they wanted, very quickly and kept the bandwidth charges down for everything else. On some of these ships the contracting firm wouldn’t pay for the cache library storage so the poor ‘contractors’ only got 30-60 minutes of internet access per 24 hours. I’d wager those ships were much angrier places....
And we could see from the number of hops who was using a VPN or speed tester so we blocked the VPNs and prioritised the speed testers so the downloads looked super-quick. And yes, in hindsight, probably I shouldn’t have said that as any former ship-based ‘contractors’ on the forums will now probably be looking for me or at least my former employers to get their money back!
I've mainly worked on floating vessels most of my offshore careers and if memory serves me right we had a couple of mb/s to do about 150-200 people.
From what I've heard from this place is that it has a dedicated fibre connection under water directly ashore with 1Gb symmetrical connection speed.
All our CCTV here is streamed live when needed, all meetings are done in HD video and I e just been playing my mates at online games with a ping of 30ms whilst streaming HD Netflix in my cabin.
Times have changed!
From what I've heard from this place is that it has a dedicated fibre connection under water directly ashore with 1Gb symmetrical connection speed.
All our CCTV here is streamed live when needed, all meetings are done in HD video and I e just been playing my mates at online games with a ping of 30ms whilst streaming HD Netflix in my cabin.
Times have changed!
Soldato
- Joined
- 13 Apr 2013
- Posts
- 13,195
- Location
- La France
Fibre optic link or microwave link to the next landward platform.
I've worked away from home for a few years and mostly had terrible connection to back home.
Looks like this new place is a little different...
The download is probably taking a hit as there are a few hundred people around at the minute.
Amazing connection speeds! Crazy when you think how far away from "civilisation" you are but you do have to marvel at what you can actually do now.
I'd be amazed if Gigabit RF was going anywhere near that distance. Even the "really" good stuff operating at 80Ghz struggles going above 3Km. Once you get to 6Km then the first rain shower will likely cut your link off. With RF at those distances the curvature of the earth also becomes an issue.
FTTOR (Fibre-to-The-Oil-Rig)? Just keep an eye out for those Russians with their deep dive drones that can snip cables!
I'm sure we will see a greater throughput soon. We currently are feeding three rigs (Including this one) and one is due to depart at the end of this month which will free up bandwidth used by approx 400 persons. After speaking to the IT department about it, We are currently throttling the bandwidth at around 60-70% too.
Haha the old prioritise speed test trick XD