Stratos Global, the leading global provider of advanced mobile and fixed-site remote communications solutions, today announced the commercial availability of FBBPlus, its managed global broadband service for the maritime industry.
Stratos’ innovative FBBPlus solution offers shipping companies a highly flexible migration path toward Inmarsat’s Global Xpress 50Mbps services, which is expected to be commercially available in 2014.
FBBPlus combines Inmarsat’s popular FleetBroadband satellite communications service with Ku-band VSAT service. For a flat monthly fee, FBBPlus offers a managed data communications capability of up to 25 GB per month.
The turnkey service offering, predictable cost, and high data allowance make FBBPlus ideally suited for global shipping companies that are customizing their own network environment and require greater throughputs and bandwidth.
Stratos recently began deploying FBBPlus on approximately 40 vessels for Hapag-Lloyd, under a five-year contract. Hapag-Lloyd, based in Hamburg, is one of the world’s largest shipping companies and is recognized as having developed one of the shipping industry’s most advanced IT systems.
For Hapag-Lloyd, Stratos is fully integrating FBBPlus with AmosConnect – Stratos’ sophisticated maritime communications application – to manage all email, fax, SMS and interoffice communications. Also, The Stratos Advantage suite of value-added services will help Hapag-Lloyd attain the highest possible FBBPlus performance, security and cost control.
The FBBPlus service successfully meets the increasing data requirements of shipping companies. It offers the highly reliable FleetBroadband service with the capability and capacity of Ku-band VSAT within high-density shipping areas.
FBBPlus is the only service that delivers a managed MPLS extension network over separate L-band and Ku-band networks, delivering resilient and redundant paths. The MPLS network separates and logically manages business, crew and non-essential traffic – while delivering high-quality voice communications via the highly efficient Inmarsat circuit-switched network.
“Hapag-Lloyd is impressed by our ability to offer a flexible, fully managed broadband service. Because FBBPlus is based on FleetBroadband, Hapag-Lloyd is confident that it will help them meet their business goals and provide their ships with optimal performance and reliability at all times,” said Stratos President and CEO Jim Parm.
Parm concluded, “As the world’s leading FleetBroadband distributor, we understand the demand for higher volumes of data to support critical applications and business communications onboard – along with the increasing need to support crew with Internet-based services. Our creative FBBPlus solution demonstrates that we are perfectly positioned to expand our customers’ communications capabilities as we prepare for the availability Inmarsat’s Global Xpress services.”
Source: Press Release
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