$1.6 million contract for offshore communications network

Redline Communications has received a $1.6 million contract to deliver a marine communications network based on the recently announced RAS Extend Marine product.

The customer, a government organization whose ships are used to patrol the waters of its country’s coastline to ensure the safety of its citizens, will be using the Redline network to enhance its high speed communications capabilities within 80 kilometers of its shoreline where the fleet spends the majority of its time. With their Redline network, ships within 80 km of shore can be connected cost-effectively, giving them real-time coverage of maritime borders and a holistic view of all ships for wide area fleet tracking, sensor integration, support for prevention operations, and even Internet access for crews.

Designed initially for communications between offshore oil drilling platforms and the many ships that service those platforms, The RAS-Extend Marine is a wireless broadband networking system designed to connect moving assets in remote locations over sea, automatically locating and connecting to a network base station, which can be located on a ship, platform or shore. Because it can maintain reliable high speed connectivity, RAS-Extend Marine can be used for a wide range of applications at the same time —including high-speed data, high-resolution video, Wi-Fi, telephony, satellite communications extension, and backhaul services.
This customer had been actively involved in the initial field trials of this new product and was impressed with the performance of the product, which consistently delivered higher throughput over longer distances than originally expected. A documented account of their field trial experience can be found on the Redline blog, and other trials of this product by oil and gas operators are ongoing.

“With the type of performance that the RAS Extend Marine system delivered to this customer, terrestrial wireless is a very viable alternative to satellite, exceeding its capacity performance with lower latency and no usage fees,” stated Bojan Subasic, vice president of research and development at Redline. “This has the potential to reduce communications costs significantly for marine applications including communications among ships and offshore drilling platforms, communications among ships in harbors, and for naval organizations that patrol coastal waters.”

The deployment of the network is expected to start immediately with full deployment expected by the end of 2014.