JR Shipping Group

Case Study: JR Shipping Group

Based in Harlingen from 1993, JR Shipping Group operates its own fleet, comprising container feeder, multipurpose and offshore service vessels, and provides all-round ship management services to third parties. With its compact organisation ashore that is always on the ball, the short sea shipping company focusses on maximum safety and efficiency.

JR Shipping has been active as an international short sea shipping partner, specialising in the operation and management of container feeder vessels, multipurpose vessels and offshore service vessels. Their shipping company supplies all-round ship and project management services, with 100% focus on quality, reliability and safety.

Challenge

On the vessels LAN side the biggest challenge was to provide tickets with data quotas per month to the crew and insight in what is happening on the vessel when the connection is congested by video or other downloads with a high payload.

The second challenge was the cancellation of roaming. Since that has been cancelled in Europe, customers can benefit from larger data pools and thus higher data consumption. On the hardware side you need equipment that can manage the higher data throughput. That was not within the current solution.

Solutions

In cooperation with Netmark, Peplink and Poynting Oceansat has engineered and aligned a high quality infrastructure on 4G which is capable of connecting the vessel to the worldwide 4G network, which is even ready for the 5G future which is coming for sure !

A Poynting omni-291 ruggedized antenna is installed with the proper gain, proven quality and a broad range of frequencies (also 5G ready) and a Peplink Balance 30 LTE-A with matching Access Points which we connected via low loss CE400 cables without any coils in the cable track.

Benefits

Load balancing between 2 different SIM’s with 2 different profiles. This configuration saves a lot of money because the customer can switch between profiles bases on country and least cost.
Peplink InControl2 gives us quick access on the network for support purposes and adjusting the settings on the network when needed, no matter where the vessel is.
The sophisticated captive portal is plug and play, but we can customize it (JR Shipping look and feel) and even program it via API in the future.
The infrastructure is future proof. 5G compliant.
With the modem inside the Peplink we can connect to operators worldwide due to the wide support of frequencies.

“The data-usage in the first weeks is already 4 times bigger than expected and 8 times bigger than the previous solution due to the quality and reliability of the network !”

Overview

Our Peplink partner, OceanSat offered them an affordable and automated solution to reduce the fixed costs. OceanSat is a well-known company in the Maritime sector. They have meetings every week across the entire market to promote their 4G solutions. When they do so, they always raise the attention for Peplink products, the “heart” of their connection. In this case, OceanSat mentioned a Peplink solution to the customer, although they were already aware of the brand

Challenge

At sea it is commonly known to have a cellular connection within approximately the first 12 miles. However, this strongly depends on the alignment of the antenna, cable and router (above and below deck equipment). If there is equipment installed from different manufacturers/brands, there is no real insight in the cellular coverage or signal strengths at sea, various bands (EDGE, 3G, 4G) to connect to and general knowledge about the (multi-band) antenna technology. That is why you need to be critical on the choice of hardware. This general problem on most seagoing vessels, causes an uncontrolled and difficult task to set up cellular connections at the vessel at sea. Once in port, the congestion of the network due to the many users in the port in combination with weather and chemical environment makes it also difficult to have an optimal network performance. Which is resulting in a slow and unreliable connection.

Solution

Make sure the vessel has a reliable, best possible internet connection at sea and in port.
Provide insight in the connections data-usage, users, connected equipment, access points, etc
Provide quick access onto the vessels LAN to adjust or manipulate settings.
Provide pro-active support to all vessels.

As said, as system integrator, you want an aligned single brand solution where you control the entire TX and RX chain from Vessels LAN to the internet. You want to manage the antennas performance or at least measure it. You want matching as short as possible cabling (or actually no cabling at all) and of course you want to have a router with the best and innovative software package available to provide the right insight, access and support to the vessel and their network.

Peplink Balance 30 LTE-A

As result, the data-usage in the first weeks is already 4 times bigger than expected and 8 times bigger than the previous solution due to the quality and reliability of the network!

Peplink’s InControl2 ticks all the boxes ! With incontrol2 and the build-in captive portal we provide all the necessary insights, support and access. We even customized the splash page of the captive portal in the look and feel from the customer which gives the user the feeling that they are in the office, while at sea. And, the customer can see all his vessels and their performance on this own telephone with the InControl2 app, so the information between us, the customer and the vessel is aligned like never before.

In total, 25 vessels will be equipped with the Peplink solution in a period of 2 months. The customer has his own IT department, so they came with the network diagram and are aware of all technical aspects of the solution. We assist in monitoring the network pro-active and we support the IT department with adjustments in the network within the GUI of Peplink’s InControl2.

Want to share your Case study with us ?

Let us know !

contact