The shipping industry has been relatively slow to embrace the Internet of Things (IoT). Inmarsat and Denmark-based Danelec Marine plan to change that.
“The critical element in any IoT system is the availability of timely, high-quality data through reliable low-cost connections from remotely-located machines, equipment and systems,” Danelec CEO Hans Ottosen explained to NauticExpo e-magazine. “Not a problem in land-based transportation modes, but a tremendous hurdle for ships at sea—it would be prohibitively difficult and expensive to create a custom data network for each ship.”
The company’s answer is DanelecConnect, the industry’s first open-architecture universal shipboard data collection and transfer platform. And at SMM in early September in Hamburg, Danelec announced a strategic partnership with satellite communications giant Inmarsat, which launched its new maritime Fleet Data IoT service at the show.
“The first and only highly reliable, dedicated bandwidth-inclusive IoT service on a sensor-agnostic platform, Fleet Data will allow ship owners and managers to access the IoT’s full efficiency-enhancing potential in real time,” Inmarsat business development VP Stefano Poli told NauticExpo e-magazine.
Danelec will develop a shipboard data collection and processing system for Fleet Data. DanelecConnect’s open architecture allows it to accept serial and analog data from all types of equipment with no special custom interfaces. A ship can thus collect and transmit thousands of data sets via satellite.
