One of Greece’s largest ship operators, Minerva Marine Inc. (“Minerva”), has installed Inmarsat’s Fleet Xpress alongside Navarino technology onboard the majority of its managed vessels.
63 vessels have now adopted Fleet Xpress in conjunction with Navarino’s Infinity Cube to provide high bandwidth and advanced, fully redundant communications to their daily operations across the globe. Most vessels are equipped with Cobham antennas providing FX bandwidth packages of high or ultra-high speed.
Ms Eftihia Benaki, Minerva’s IT Manager and CySO, said ‘Fleet Xpress and Infinity Cube have really opened up the technological possibilities of our fleet, both for crew use and for our business use.
The welfare of the crews of our managed vessels is one of our top priorities and thanks to the fixed fee and high speed nature of Fleet Xpress we are able to offer them free internet. Thanks to the Infinity Cube we have onboard, we do not need to issue PINs, as crewmember’s data allowance is linked to their registered user account on the Infinity. The way we have set up the Infinity with our crewing system also means that when a seafarer joins or leaves a vessel, his account automatically follows them, which saves a lot of administration.
The great bandwidths available over Fleet Xpress and with Infinity acting as the ‘brain’ of the vessel, we can now carry out hourly application data syncs between all vessels and our offices as well as shared folders syncs. For some time now, we are also making significant use of video calling with our ships, or sending and receiving videos from onboard when needed. Generally we are able to use data-hungry applications with ease thanks to FX.
Looking ahead, we want to continue to ensure that our managed vessels are equipped with the most cutting edge, reliable technology and so we are currently in the process of beta testing Navarino’s Spectrum service, which we believe can help us with the remote IT services and we are also testing Angel, Navarino’s cyber security solution.’
Navarino’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, Andreas Dimitriadis, said ‘We are extremely proud to be working in partnership with Minerva to help them ensure their managed vessels remain constantly online and to equip them with the technology they need to satisfy all of their business and crew welfare requirements. It is a pleasure to work with a company like Minerva, which is very advanced in its thinking as this challenges us to find innovative solutions and services that can cater to their needs. This makes for a partnership with real synergy, as both Minerva and Navarino benefit from each other’s expertise and ideas. I look forward to continuing our excellent work together for many years to come and I would like to thank the Minerva team for putting their trust in Navarino.’