Trading & Commercial Fleets
Your fleet moves. Your connectivity governance should keep up.
Orbit gives you a unified picture of what is performing, what has failed, and what the documented record looks like at month end. SPS Networks owns the SLA behind it.
We know what running a trading fleet's connectivity actually looks like.
A vessel departs Singapore on VSAT primary. LEO offload kicks in on passage. Port-side LTE in Fujairah. Back to VSAT in the Red Sea. L-band as the backup throughout. Five coverage environments, four potential bearer transitions, one voyage — and the crew welfare clock running the entire time.
Multiply that across a fleet of ten, twenty, fifty vessels. Each running a variation of the same bearer mix. Each with its own vendor support relationship. Each producing its own version of the same monthly invoice with no unified cost view across the fleet.
When a vessel's connectivity degrades at 0200hrs three days out of port, the master or the superintendent works the phones — satellite provider, LEO support desk, whoever picks up. The incident is eventually resolved. It is rarely documented in a form that means anything to an auditor, a client, or a class inspector six months later.
That is not a technology failure. It is a governance failure. And it is almost universal in fleet operations today.
MLC, ISM, and your commercial obligations are all asking the same question: can you demonstrate it?
MLC 2006 — Crew communication entitlements
The Maritime Labour Convention creates enforceable rights for seafarers around access to communication services. Operators must be able to demonstrate that crew communication policy is defined, implemented, and accessible. An inspection that asks for evidence of crew communication entitlement management needs a documented answer — not a verbal one.
ISM Code — Communication system records
The International Safety Management Code requires documented evidence of communication system operability and maintenance. When a class surveyor or PSC inspector reviews your SMS documentation, communication system records are within scope. A monthly governance pack from Orbit is the documented record that closes this requirement without additional manual effort.
Commercial SLA obligations
Charter parties and commercial contracts increasingly carry explicit connectivity performance expectations. If a charterer or a client disputes a connectivity service claim, your ability to defend your position depends entirely on what you can document. Opinion and recollection are not a defence. A monthly governance pack is.
One governance model across your entire fleet.
Fleet-wide visibility
Every vessel in your fleet — bearer health, latency, connectivity status — visible in a single console in real time. Degradation flagged before your operations team hears about it from the vessel.
Crew welfare governance
Usage controls defined and enforced as policy — not improvised per vessel. Crew communication entitlements documented and consistently applied across the fleet. MLC-relevant usage records produced as a standard output.
Incident workflow from detection to resolution
Every connectivity incident enters a single structured workflow. Severity assigned. Root cause documented. Resolution tracked. No more incidents that live only in a superintendent's inbox or a WhatsApp thread.
Monthly governance packs — per vessel and fleet aggregate
Every vessel produces a governance pack at month end: uptime per bearer, latency P50 and P95, packet loss averages, incident summary, actions and improvements. Fleet aggregate view available simultaneously. ISM-ready. Client-ready. Class-ready.
Route and coverage visibility
Orbit's coverage data gives your operations team advance visibility of bearer performance by route and region — where handoff risk exists, where LEO coverage is thin, where LTE roaming creates cost exposure.
Cost accountability across the fleet
Bearer usage and cost patterns tracked across your full fleet — by vessel, by route, by month. No more reconciling separate invoices with no unified view.
Deployed across your fleet without replacing anything.
Orbit integrates with your existing bearer infrastructure. Starlink, Inmarsat FleetBroadband, Iridium Certus, regional LTE — whatever your vessels are running. No hardware replacement. No new satellite contracts.
Discovery
We review your fleet configuration: vessel count, bearer mix per vessel, operating regions, current pain points. One call, fifteen to thirty minutes.
First-pass architecture — within 3 working days
Fleet-level deployment outline: how Orbit integrates with your existing infrastructure, which SLA tier fits your fleet, what thirty days looks like.
Deployment
Edge agents deployed per vessel. Policy intent configured — failover logic, usage thresholds, crew welfare controls. Console provisioned for your team.
SLA live — day thirty
Monitoring active across your fleet. First governance packs generated. Monthly cadence begins: observe, respond, report, improve.
The accountable operator, not the IT team.
The person this page is written for is the one whose name is on the vessel's SMS, the one who fields the call from the master when communications fail at 0200hrs, and the one who has to answer a class surveyor's questions about communication system records.
That might be a Fleet Operations Manager, a Marine Superintendent, a Director of Marine Operations, or a Ship Manager. The title varies. The accountability doesn't.
If you are responsible for the communications performance of a trading or commercial fleet — and you do not currently have a system that produces documented evidence of that performance on a monthly cadence — Orbit is built for you.
Ready to make connectivity accountable?
Fifteen minutes is enough for us to understand your environment and come back with a first-pass architecture — vessel or site mix, bearer configuration, SLA tier recommendation. Not a generic pitch. An engineering conversation.
One control plane. One SLA. One partner.