Telecom: Cellular-like Service on Rivers, Great Lakes and Coastal Areas
Marine radio has often had an old-fashioned quality to it.
Even after touchtone phones came into homes, a pleasure boater’s ship-to-shore call required the intervention of an old-fashioned telephone operator.
San Diego-based Cubic Corp. is now at work on a new update for the public marine radiotelephone system , one that will bring wireless Internet, e-mail, voice, touch-tone telephone and fax service to the water.
The communications system, dubbed the Wireless VHF Radiotelephone Network, will ultimately carry voice and data on the nation’s major rivers, on the Great Lakes and in the coastal waters of the United States. It will serve commercial shippers and recreational boaters as well as the government.
Cubic subsidiary Cubic Communications stands to make up to $30 million in building infrastructure components for the wireless system, which will be able to send signals 50 to 100 miles out to sea.
Cubic is a subcontractor to Melbourne, Fla.-based Harris Corp., which is building the system for New York City-based MariTEL, Inc. MariTEL was the successful bidder for the FCC’s maritime VHF spectrum licenses in 1998.
The San Diego company has already provided 30 digital radio base station systems for the network. These have been deployed around the Gulf of Mexico as well as on the lower Mississippi. MariTEL plans to launch service on them this month.
Cubic last week announced a two-part, three-year contract with Harris that will expand the system.
The first phase, valued at $7.5 million, will add 129 sites to complete the network buildout along the Atlantic, Pacific and Mississippi. Cubic will produce approximately 700 digital transceivers and 130 direction finder processors. The latter are used for vessel location and cellular-like hand-off between sites.
With the second phase, Cubic could deliver as many as 3,000 transceivers and 100 direction finder processors. Delivery could be complete by 2003.
Richard Lober, president and CEO of Cubic Communications, said he expected his company to deliver “a good amount” of the second-phase order, if not the full $30 million worth.
Cubic has 15 to 20 employees working on the maritime infrastructure, said Lober.
He added the components are being produced in San Diego by “two or three fairly well-known” contract manufacturers, which he declined to name.
The system operates on a VHF channel with limited bandwidth, which brings technical challenges, Cubic executives said.
Lober said the MariTEL project is evidence of Cubic’s increasing emphasis on commercial communications.
Cubic Communications is actually part of its parent company’s defense group. It is better known for making signal intercept devices for intelligence agencies.
Ultimately, the components Cubic is building for the maritime system could be deployed on 291 cellular-like radio towers. The network will also be able to determine vessel location.
“It’s very similar to a cellular buildout,” Lober said. “You establish yourself and then you start adding capacity and adding coverages as your system grows.”
