I’m currently, at a guess, about twenty or thirty miles from the nearest land, sitting around in the main lounge of a ferry on my laptop, which is connected to a wifi network.
That much I know. More to the point, how is the internet connection from the ship to the shore working? The wifi is either super cheap or free so I doubt it’s a satellite connection, but the range seems too much for 3g type stuff doesn’t it?
I think it has to be satellite. What else could it be?
Twenty miles to shore could be a microwave link.
Has to be satellite. 20-30 miles should be well over the horizon.
Unless it’s a big ship + a tall receiver. Connecting to the Iridium satellites is probably more realistic.
It work by burning you dog.
It would be difficult to maintain a link over microwave from a ship - each end would need to track the other, and whereas ship based systems regularly track satellites, a land based system to track the ship would be unusual, especially a line of them down a coast, with each one only able to serve a single ship at a time.
Conventional satellite based internet would be fine if the ship was in the footprint of the satellite - and a ferry would likely never stray far from land so this is likely OK. A common satellite tracking mount on the ship would be used for the dish.
Straying further from shore and there are satellite internet systems specifically designed for ships. BGAN is one. You get about ADSL speeds, but the data costs are pretty eye-watering.
I suppose in theory it could be done with sea platforms, stationary repeater ships, tethered balloons, or drones, but I don’t think anything like that has been deployed, at least not for day to day civilian use.
The big ships use Cellular at Sea. WMS
Which they achieve by using satellites.
http://www.wmsatsea.com/technology.html
It works pretty well too. I was able to Facetime with my daughter when we were in the Gulf of Mexico. I would have thought that the satellite delay would have messed it up but I didn’t notice any difference.
For a commercial application, it will be satellite. Either MTNSat (as referenced) or Inmarsat. The bandwidth has increased dramatically over the past 10 years or so, in part, due to the war in the gulf.
If it was a ferry, as they are typically smaller and have less top-side space available, it would probably be Inmarsat as they have much smaller radomes. MTNSat seems to be a service provider for Ku-band terminals with rollover to Inmarsat once you go outside the Ku-band coverage area. Imarsat can go up to 492/492 and Ku-band can be much higher.
Do you know which ferry it was? Maybe I can find an image of it online and look for the type of radome.
I laughed.
Try not to sit around on your laptop, it might affect transmission.