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Royal Wagenborg renews and extends contract with Castor Marine

Royal Wagenborg has renewed and extended Castor Marine’s Global Ku VSAT connection for multiple years. This guarantees onboard internet connectivity, readying their fleet for future safe and efficient journeys. Since 1898 the Dutch family-owned shipping company has been crossing the oceans, developing to a modern environment-friendly fleet operator with about 200 vessels. Besides the extension of 52 Global Ku VSAT contracts, Castor Marine will equip an additional 15 Wagenborg vessels, currently on 4G, with VSAT. Castor Marine is proud of Wagenborg’s trust in its services.

Partners in digital transformation

For more than eight years the company has provided VSAT, Iridium, Inmarsat FBB, and IT services to the Wagenborg fleet. Theo Klimp, Fleet Director at Wagenborg Shipping recommends Castor Marine’s services: “Since 2014 Castor Marine showed us to be a solid and stable partner. As Wagenborg we are investing in crew welfare and technology to make our vessels smart and environmentally friendly. It’s great that we can achieve our goals in collaboration with Castor Marine as our communication provider. We are looking forward to work with Castor and use new communication solutions in the upcoming years to support and enable our digital transformation.”

Ivo Veldkamp, CEO at Castor Marine is grateful to continue the collaboration: “It’s a pleasure to be Royal Wagenborg’s communication and connectivity partner for such a long time. We’re proud to be providing VSAT and IT services to their global operating fleet and we’re looking forward to new developments in good collaboration. We also thank Wagenborg for their trust and loyalty. It fits in our ambition to build long standing relationships with our customers, based on trust, support and delivering high quality services around the clock.”

Increased bandwidth

To support Wagenborg’s strategy of smart shipping and being able to operate the global fleet more efficient and environmentally friendly, the bandwidth for the 52 vessels has been increased. This will also improve the onboard crew welfare system, as provided by Castor Marine for several years. VSAT for European trading vessels Wagenborg vessels trading in Europe will be equipped with a ‘Telenor Ka system based on iDirect and Intellian v60 Ka VSAT hardware’. These vessels currently use a 4G system and an L-band back-up system when sailing outside 4G coverage. To improve the crew welfare and support smart vessel operations 24/7 anywhere at sea, these vessels will also be provided with VSAT connections. The first installation was done in October 2021 and over 15 vessels will follow shortly.

SD-WAN Management

Castor Marine supports and manages Wagenborg’s SD-WAN routers centrally, which is ideal for monitoring, performing changes and software upgrades. In the SD-WAN setup for Wagenborg Shipping, all the business applications on the fleet are directly connected to Wagenborg’s headquarters in Delfzijl, the Netherlands. The crew welfare network operates separate from the business network and is directly connected to the public internet, after passing Castor Marine’s content filters and firewalls.