By Michelle Howard From Maritime Professional

Panasonic Avionics Corporation (Panasonic) has announced that its broadband communications and digital entertainment services will now be available to passenger vessels across the maritime market.

Panasonic offers a new approach to connectivity at sea, serving passengers and crew, as well as communications for ship operations and corporate networking. With the world’s largest, most comprehensive global broadband connectivity service, Panasonic already delivers business-critical communications to a wide range of mobility markets, leveraging a high availability Ku-band satellite network that covers more than ninety-eight percent of maritime traffic routes.

“Panasonic, in close cooperation with ITC Global, is dedicated to delivering the best in digital entertainment and enterprise quality broadband communications to the maritime industry,” said David Bruner, Vice President, Global Communications Services at Panasonic Avionics. “We believe our network strategy sets a new standard in connectivity across a wide range of markets including yachts, river cruises and other passenger vessels.”

Panasonic has made calculated investments in Ku-band for a number of reasons, including global coverage, ease of scalability, the maturity of the technology, and its high reliability. In February, the company announced multi-year contracts with satellite fleet operators, SES and Telesat, for high-powered HTS spot and wide beam Ku-band capacity to supplement its existing HTS capabilities. The agreement helps ensure a broadband experience for Panasonic customers across the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as the Mediterranean, Europe and the Middle East. In the next several years, Panasonic’s network will continue to evolve as the company rolls out extreme high-throughput (XTS) capacity in the densest of traffic areas – across North America, Europe and Asia — where these regions will be seeing multiple gigabits of capacity.

In an effort to bring a lightweight, easy to install solution to maritime customers, Panasonic has formed a cooperative with Kymeta Corporation to bring innovative, high-performance flat panel antenna technology to the maritime market. Panasonic will order a significant volume of Kymeta’s flat panel antennas and use Kymeta’s mTenna technology to manufacture and distribute maritime terminals for vessels around the world. Panasonic’s high-throughput satellite network combined with Kymeta’s lightweight antenna design will give maritime vessels the ability to provide cost-effective, ultra-reliable, high-speed connectivity to passengers and crew.

Panasonic’s new maritime solutions leverage the company’s best-in-class entertainment technology in order to address the ever-evolving connectivity requirements of today’s passenger maritime operators. Panasonic was the first to bring live, global television service to the airline industry, and has delivered over 8,000 inflight entertainment systems and 1,100 inflight connectivity solutions to the world’s leading airlines. Now that same premier entertainment platform is available to the maritime market.

For more on this story go to: http://www.maritimeprofessional.com/news/panasonics-satellite-network-reaches-caribbean-286630

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