Smooth sailing: connectivity in harsh environments for DEME

Many companies are yet to discover the benefits of wireless data, and think business-class mobile connectivity is new to the market. Not Belgium-based DEME. The marine engineering leader has been a customer of Venn Telecom since 2016.

And if there’s one company that understands the importance of dealing with complexity, it’s DEME. The company has nearly 150 years of experience, and the expertise of its 5,600+ professionals shines in the largest and most resource-intensive international projects, from South America to Southeast Asia and the EU to the Middle East.

From building offshore wind farms and expanding ports to maintaining navigable waterways and remediating polluted land, DEME operates at the interface of land and water. Much of its work takes place below the water’s surface.

Of course, the marine environment is one of the hardest places to work. Whether it’s deepening access channels to serve bigger ships or installing foundations for offshore wind farms, doing it safely and effectively – and in an environmentally friendly way - needs huge skills, vast experience, and incredibly specialised equipment. Fortunately, DEME has all three.

Every vessel and asset in the organisation is perfectly designed for its job, often to extremely narrow specifications. (Since efficiency is everything.) A dredging vessel performing land reclamation near the equator has completely different operational requirements from installing foundations for offshore wind farms in the North Sea. But what all these parts have in common is a need to exchange data – and lots of it, in many forms and formats.

For most companies, that means SD-WAN: a private network carrying data in encrypted “tunnels” over public infrastructure like telephone cables and cellular providers. Trouble is, when you’re building big new projects in the world’s oceans, there’s not a lot of network infrastructure there already to use as your underlay.

And that’s where Venn Telecom made waves. Here’s how it sought to bring simplicity and utility to DEME’s network complexity – while improving performance for everyone. Many thanks to Kristof Ternoey, DEME’s Lead System Engineer, for talking to us about the solution we created together … a solution for those who work at sea.

"Venn Telecom’s answer combines existing technologies like VSAT with cellular providers and LEO satellite networks like Starlink and Oneweb."

Why did you choose to work with Venn?

A decade ago, DEME was aware of the potential for wireless connectivity – but it had discovered much of the technology on the market needed a surprising amount of human resource to operate. Wireless routers were available that connected to existing cellular and satellite networks, using the antenna to enable remote bandwidth offshore – but SIM cards in these routers needed to be changed by hand, and having people available in these locations wasn’t easy.

In addition, bandwidth was scarce: the company found itself constantly short of capacity, with limits as low as 2Gb per SIM. At one point it was changing SIMs several times each week! Some providers simply shrugged these off as costs of business. But Venn’s experts saw it differently.

Venn Telecom illustrated a solution that changed the emphasis, setting bandwidth availability through the contract, not the hardware. Its first idea was to set up SIMs without built-in capacity limits, enabling DEME to pay simple per-gigabyte costs without the need to mess around with its routers every day or two. This naturally meant immediate efficiencies. But it was just the start.

What was Venn Telecom’s solution?

Working efficiently and effectively in harsh environments means more than making bandwidth available. It’s about how you use that capacity – to keep costs under control so the business can operate efficiently. Venn Telecom’s proof of concept showed how the right choice of antennas and routers, configured in the best way, would improve both throughput and reliability, with mobile networks and satellite option working together.

The hardware choice was Peplink routers. These devices act as a “hub” for different wireless networks and can handle many services within the same router—not just cellular but Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and satellite, too. Importantly for DEME, there are weatherised options for use in the wet, windy, and salty conditions of offshore work.

This solution is far less prone to bandwidth scarcity. DEME’s SD-WAN can now make use of terrestrial cellular when close to shore (boosting the signal from distant cell towers with directional antenna) and save pricier VSAT for diversity and redundancy or when vessels move further out to sea. And since the routers combine different wireless providers into a single connection, it shifts complexity below the surface, presenting a unified always-on face to the user.

If one provider suffers downtime, the solution simply switches to another, in accordance with capacity and threshold rules DEME can set itself. It means an issue at one mobile network isn’t a crisis for DEME. And there are improvements from software, too. DEME now has access to meaningful reports and data about how its SD-WAN is performing, letting it see where bottlenecks like high latency are slowing down operations or creating cost inefficiencies.

And how has it worked?

The most obvious benefit for DEME has been smoother internet access for the company’s SD-WAN. With bandwidth not reliant on a single network provider—the routers can use satellite connections as well as multiple mobile services— the company has the luxury of choosing the option that gives the best blend of performance and cost at any given time.

Previously, they’d often had to switch to expensive satellite services for everyday connectivity; now, that connectivity is usually available from cost-effective mobile providers, with satellite acting as backup and failover. There’s even a choice among satellites, too, with traditional maritime VSAT joined today by Starlink and OneWeb.

A second plus has been customisability. Different vessels – and DEME’s are very, very different, both to “normal” ships and to each other! – have different bandwidth needs: some need greater capacity for applications, some need absolute certainty of uptime, others need to serve human crew.

The solution from Venn Telecom lets DEME “dial in” the capabilities it needs, paying only for what it specifies. There’s also burst capacity to take care of busy times – with software alarms if usage thresholds are breached, giving them the ability to control costs precisely.

Third, the company now enjoys greatly improved customer service. Venn Telecom’s online portal gives customers a Force-like awareness of their network activity: the status of each connection, new and upcoming activations, and performance statistics are all available in a customer-friendly dashboard.

When queries arise, there’s a comprehensive process in place, where users can raise trouble tickets and expect answers quickly, with the average resolution time under four hours. What’s more, Venn Telecom has big plans for its customer service systems – developing the software to include pro-active monitoring to stop problems before they start, and financial analytics that give a view on how cost-effectively each connection is being used.

Complexity solved with diversity – and more

For DEME, what marked out Venn Telecom as a long-term partner was its ability to work at enterprise scale—with the mix of skills to handle large and complex rollouts competently. (Of course, that’s doubly important when the working environment is so unforgiving of errors.)

It’s now coming up to a decade for the DEME/Venn relationship, and the view at DEME is that it’s been a successful one. A related benefit for Venn has been growing its expertise alongside DEME … meaning there have been benefits for both companies.

Venn Telecom may be a technology company, but when designing a solution for a client, its focus isn’t on how advanced the router or antenna is— it’s about how well that hardware and software solve the customer’s business problems and finding the right balance of costs and capacity to make the business case as positive as possible.

Today, DEME sees Venn Telecom as more than a supplier – it’s a strategic partner in its growth ambitions. The maritime company is increasingly looking to Venn Telecom to provide roadmaps and guidance about future network capacity and connectivity options so it can plan its future capacity needs and take advantage of new opportunities as wireless technologies evolve.

After all, for decades, the maritime world had a single option when it came to seaborne bandwidth: GEO satellites. A choice that even today suffers limited capacity, high costs, and problematic coverage. While seagoing vessels are still required to carry VSAT equipment, there are now many more options when choosing providers – from established GEO operators to newer LEO constellations with thousands of satellites in the sky.

The ocean can be a lonely place – and the sea a harsh place to do business. But for a maritime business like DEME, new technology means its mariners will never again feel isolated when getting their work done. Their business may be on the ocean waves, but DEME knows its future depends on how effectively it uses the airwaves.

The problem:

• A challenging environment beyond terrestrial network coverage.
• Diverse and complex assets for a variety of ultra-specialised tasks.
• Low tolerance for downtime due to operating expenses – as ever, time is money!

Venn solution:

• Pepwave routers combine multiple wireless technologies seamlessly
• Service aggregation and load-balancing for redundancy and diversity network-wide.
• Comprehensive customer service to identify and resolve issues same-day.

Results:

• Uninterrupted wireless WAN makes use of a variety of technologies to present seamless connectivity to users around the world
• Greater value for money with tailored making the most of available bandwidth.