Publication:Sea Talk Winter 2007/Why don’t I get regular emails from sea?
By CMDR Murray Smith and LCDR Annette Nelson, SO2 – SCIT
Apart from the obvious answer that a sailor might not have sent an e-mail in the first place, here is an explanation of why personal communication at sea is not as regular as the service you get via your home computer.
The environment at sea is particularly hostile for internet communication. In your home, you might have one or two computers accessing the net via a broadband over a wire, into a static network managed by a very large team of IT professionals such as Telstra.
At sea you might have 50 users all trying to send information ashore at the one time over a much thinner and more unreliable bearer. Currently, the best that a ship can provide is only 25 per cent of the home computer capacity and speed.
Over this, the CIS team usually pass three networks which may mean that the rest of the ship might be allocated only six per cent of the home computer capability for everything that comes from the ship.
Ships also pitch and roll, manoeuvre violently, and use complex cryptographic systems. Consequently, maintaining a continuous flow of information can be difficult.
Survey motor launches and landing craft get e-mail over an even smaller bandwidth -0.4 per cent of the home computer, due to the older system fitted. We are talking about lots of users and less than normal dial up connections - very different from the average users’ home experience. This is why e-mail attachments, such as photos, are limited.
If you want to send photos, it is better to burn them on to a disc and send it through ‘snail mail’. In this way you can send video clips of the children, images of the problems with the house that are on the long list of things to be fixed when the ship returns and the remains of the new shoes after the new puppy has chewed them. They can then be watched over and over again. But things are changing for the better.
One of the aims of Sea Change is to improve private communication within the RAN as we recognise it is important for families to keep in touch on a regular basis.
A number of new projects promise significant advances in the near term.
Bandwidth is set to improve and ships can expect to be permanently connected in the future.
The number of terminals onboard are also growing steadily, easing access issues. However, it takes time, and unfortunately it is unlikely to ever be as fast, reliable, rich or unfettered as your experience with your home computer, or indeed the office system ashore.
Remember though, that the people in your CIS department onboard are doing their best to deliver is the best service possible within fairly extreme technical constraints.
