The industry's recognized authority for design, engineering and application of equipment and services in the global ocean community
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48 st / July 2014 www.sea-technology.com the C-Bird during a regular port call, Maritime Broadband will send an en- gineer to oversee the installation upon request. The process takes about six hours and does not require the ship to go to dry dock. Underscoring the ease with which a C-Bird antenna can be assembled on board, one vessel crew in Louisi- ana that was anxious to have access to the Internet, recently took matters into their own hands. The fve crates con- taining the C-Bird antenna had been delivered on board and, while they were scheduled to be visited by a cer- tifed engineer to oversee the installa- tion the following week, the crew took on assembling the antenna themselves, without even a manual. When the en- gineer arrived, the work had all been completed. "We designed C-Bird to be very in- tuitive and that installation proved it to be true," said Kramer. "They sent us a photo of the anten- na fully assembled. It took them just four hours." Trials and Deployment C-Bird is fast gaining wide accep- tance in the shipping industry. The company recently added Enterprises Shipping & Trading (Athens, Greece) as a client following a successful trial on several of their 100 vessels. Hel- lespont Ship Management (Hamburg, Germany) recently placed an order for a third C-Bird after a successful trial on the Hellespont Progress. Sobelmar of Brasschaat, Belgium, has taken deliv- ery of three C-Bird systems following a successful trial on the MV Kovdor. In addition, DRYNET (Kiel, Germany), Dutch Marine (Rotterdam, Nether- lands), Elektro Deniz (Istanbul, Turkey), Hellenic Radio Services (Athens) and Telaccount Overseas (Cyprus) have joined as key distribution partners of C-Bird. Maritime Broadband is presently in talks with additional shipping compa- nies that own more than 3,000 vessels combined. Feedback from users has been uni- versally positive. "Easy to maintain and troubleshoot, easy-to-understand Web interface, system is not complicated and very friendly shore support," said John Slv of the Nordic Aurora. Holger Ritter of DRYNET explained why his company recently became a channel partner to Maritime Broad- band: "Commercial shipping compa- nies are challenged to fnd cost-eff- cient broadband for their vessels. This is mainly driven by their needs for crew Internet and IT integration, as well as new applications supporting ECDIS, performance monitoring and predic- tive maintenance," said Ritter. "From our perspective, Maritime Broadband's C-Bird offers the best value and price/ performance in satellite communica- tions for commercial maritime users. It is easy to deploy, yet robust and pow- erful with global coverage, unlimited data and very attractive pricing. It de- livers exactly what commercial ship- ping companies need today and com- pletes DRYNET's solution portfolio in a very attractive way." Maritime Broadband is privately funded and is in the process of expand- ing its production capabilities to sup- port the growing market demand. n Peter Moses is a communications and public re- lations professional in the New York City metro- politan area. He is a seasoned journalist who has worked in print, radio and television news for more than 30 years. Idyllwild, CA 92549 USA • Phone: (951) 659-2183 • Fax: (951) 659-3958 sales@southbaycable.com • http://www.southbaycable.com SOUTH BAY CABLES are the uncommon connection for tough jobs around the world. Uncommon in our industry, South Bay Cable has been owned and operated by the same management since 1957! We've designed and manufactured over 60,000 different cables meeting our customers most demanding requirements. Contact the uncommon leader . SOUTH BAY CABLE CORP