LEO may be the future of satcom, but think about back-up

Maximilian Heetel, Team Lead Fleet IT, MaDaTec

Low earth orbiting (LEO) satellites can offer much cheaper and faster communications, but do not expect global coverage from any network, and it is the back-ups that get expensive. Maximilian Heetel explained

Report from People Tech Maritime Hamburg

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications are “just state of the art technology”, said Maximilian Heetel, Team Lead Fleet IT, MaDaTec, speaking at People Tech Maritime in Hamburg. They make “quite a difference” to VSAT.

Mr Heetel has worked in vessel IT for 7 years, mostly as a technician, including 2 years as a VSAT engineer. “I know that from bottom to top,” he said. Before that, he spent 20 years doing IT administration on shore.

When Mr Heetel started working in the maritime sector, ships were only using data connectivity to send e-mails, or maintenance system updates. There was no ECDIS route plotting onshore.

But in the past 7 years he has seen ships move from Iridium and Inmarsat Fleet Broadband to VSAT, get wi-fi for the first time, move from metered connections to unlimited data, and see an increase in data speed.

Now we have a much bigger jump with LEO systems, which so far means Starlink and OneWeb. Companies see four times more bandwidth, a big reduction in latency (communication travel time), and some reduction in cost.

It means there is genuine real time connectivity between shore and ship. A route can be plotted on a shore office computer and received on the ECDIS unit on a ship seconds later.

Vessels are increasingly connecting to cloud-based data services. For example, sending performance data to the cloud, to run analytics to optimise route, speed, and fuel consumption. This all increases the demand on IT systems onboard, he said.

Fixing VSAT and Fleet Broadband satellite communications systems on the monkey island of a ship used to be a very difficult job, requiring a crane, and a lot of cost, he said. But LEO antennas can be installed by just one person.

MaDaTec is a specialist service provider in vessel IT / connectivity and navigation system management. It is a joint venture of Hamburg shipping companies Hammonia and Nordic Hamburg. It serves 100 vessels.

MaDaTec was one of the first maritime companies to purchase Starlink antennas on a big scale for its customers. Now it also purchases OneWeb for many customers, he said.

SUBHEAD

Global availability

A 100 per cent global coverage with any single LEO network is never going to happen, he said.

Many shipping companies and crew do not yet realise that Starlink cannot be used everywhere. Mr Heetel hears complaints from vessels who do one trade a year in China and expect Starlink to be working from there.

As of July 2026, Starlink is not yet available but “coming soon” in India, Turkey, Thailand, all North African countries and South Africa, according to Starlink’s website. The non-availability is due to regulatory reasons not technical ones, with the relevant authorities not yet allowing it to be used. The duration of “soon” depends on the speed of the bureaucracy in those countries.

Starlink is not expected at all in China or Russia. China will only allow Chinese satcoms to be used in Chinese waters, with a number of Chinese LEO networks with a Chinese solution being developed. Shipping companies will be able to use this in China, but they may not be able to use it elsewhere. Also, they may will need separate antennas for the Chinese service.

Starlink is currently not able to work without a GPS signal, he said. This means it cannot be used if GPS spoofing or jamming is going on. This happens in Northeast Europe (Baltics) and the Middle East. OneWeb is able to “kind of” work without a GPS signal, but VSAT is better, he said.

Amazon LEO satcom is likely to be the next one available.

Asked about how Starlink compares to OneWeb, Mr Heetel said that Starlink is better for performance and cost, but OneWeb has better coverage. As of May 2026, OneWeb is available in Turkey and Starlink is not. Starlink only recently became available in the UAE, OneWeb was available earlier.

Starlink is easier to set up, “you plug in the antenna and send them the terminal number.” With OneWeb, it “is a bit trickier setting it up.”

Keeping options open

Shipping companies are unlikely to be able to run their satcoms with just one system. as they could in the past, with VSAT and Iridium.Inmarsat is a provider offering for example VSAT and Fleet Broadband (FBB). FBB is the backup for VSAT, so the vessels never just used one system.

There are some vessels active only in Northern Europe, such as feeder vessels, which have removed Iridium/Fleet Broadband and “sometimes even VSAT”, relying solely on OneWeb and Starlink.

But otherwise, it pays to keep your options open, he said.

Keeping VSAT on standby can be an option to optimize costs while keeping options open.

For example, vessels in the Middle East often have Starlink, OneWeb and VSAT, with VSAT mainly as a standby option, he said.

It is important that shipping companies let their communications service providers know where the vessel is going to be, he said. If they are planning to sail outside a Starlink or OneWeb coverage area, their provider can make sure they have an alternative.

It is only possible to rely heavily on OneWeb and Starlink as carriers with no other backup, if the vessel stays in areas reliably supporting both carriers.

MaDaTec itself decided not to be a satcom reseller in order to maintain flexibility, with no-one knowing which systems will be dominant in future. For example, nobody yet knows what Amazon’s LEO offer will look like, he said.

Crew satcom

Expectations from crew about communications are rising. Some seafarers have mistakenly made official MLC complaints when communication through Starlink was not available. They expect to be able to make video calls and considered being online via VSAT as being offline, he said.

But it is easily possible to enable videocalls, when shipping companies can buy 1 TB of satcom at a price they previously paid for 1 GB.

An audience discussion revealed that some shipping companies still only buy 100 GB a month per ship and might give individual crewmembers 5 GB. Another company buys a terabyte per month for the ship and gives each crewmember 1.5 GB per day. This also ensures they do not inadvertently use all their allowance in the first weeks of the month. This is still not enough to stream movies to the ship.

An audience member said that shipping companies typically pay around $1000 per month for 1TB with Starlink.

Some shipowners specify how much satcom they want each crewmember to have; others set the overall communications budget for the ship and say the manager can allocate it as they see fit but try to “make the crew happy”. Ship managers may try to keep 20% of the Starlink allocation for business use.

An attendee from satcom company Inmarsat noted that Inmarsat currently provides ships with unlimited data in a package. This means that there is no need to manage or police crew consumption.