Cape Town to St Helena - Day 13 1200UTC
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Vega
Hugh and Annie
Mon 6 Mar 2023 12:26
17:27.7S 02:25.0W COG310 SOG 7kts Wind F6 SSE Poled out genoa only overnight. The first time! Very rolly this morning but the wind has increased and we have big waves but with a longer period between. More stable. Just put up mainsail with two reefs wing on wing with genoa. 8.8kts!! Have reefed the genoa in significantly………. Still hoping to arrive tomorrow. EmilyLuna just has 100nm to run. Having written about our ability to keep in touch through the Iridium satellite system, my love/hate relationship with our Iridium Pilot continues. Our Pilot is the hardware system fitted into the boat that, combined with additional Mailasail hardware and software, creates a wifi hub with broadband speed. We pay a monthly subscription to AST, the company that supplies the iridium usage, with an inclusive data allowance in our case of 10MB each month. 10MB may not sound very much (and it isn’t very much by terrestrial broadband standards) but the compression software we use means that 10MB is enough for email and weather gribs. We could use uncompressed data and surf the net, receive email attachments and so forth but to do so would use a lot more data and be astronomically expensive. There is a more frequently used alternative hardware system called Iridium Go. Linked to a satphone it allows unlimited data each month for a similar cost to that for our 10MB. The Go system is however a lot slower than the Pilot to the extent that the unlimited data usage is academic - it will only cope with compressed email and weather gribs and you just have to wait longer for them to download. Had I been fully aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each system at the time I would undoubtedly have opted for the Go system. It is cheaper to buy, the hardware is small and easily installed and you always have the sat phone to take into your liferaft. Ed Wildgoose at Mailasail and who supplied the Pilot says I have a Rolls Royce system. Yes Ed, but I actually only need a Morris Minor. And now for the big pitfall with the Pilot system. Any data used above your chosen monthly plan is charged at a premium rate per megabyte. There is, of course, no carry over of unused data from one month to the next but also no limit to the amount of data you can use in any month. You can set up notifications for the amount of data you have used and also a cut off point at which the system shuts down to avoid further cost. Once the system has shut down though you have to go through a whole new form filling set up procedure and receive a new SIM card to get it going again - really helpful in the middle of the South Atlantic. So to avoid the system shutting down on you at sea you have to set a high cut off point. Like many online management systems these days (bank, mobile phone, you name it) the responsibility for managing the system has shifted from the company providing it to the consumer. The systems are run by computers and all the management options are with the consumer. Thus when using the Pilot you need to switch it on (fair enough) but then carefully manage it to ensure you are using the minimum amount of data. Every time you use it you must select the degree of compression required. The default position is of course completely unrestricted and uncompressed internet access rather than the highly compressed specific usage you actually require. The interface for the Pilot system is whatever device you normally use, iPads or iPhone in our case. From the ipad you select the Pilot as your internet source. As far as the ipad is concerned the Pilot is just a source of internet like any other. You therefore need to manage your devices very carefully and, for example, switch off email accounts other than Mailasail, switch off background app refresh, in fact anything that will use data if you get the compression setting on the Pilot wrong or it is in default mode. A further complication is that there is a server for our Mailasail account that also has to be managed. Some of this management has to be done online, some can be done from your iPad . It is important to understand how the server works. For example, every time Mailasail checks for new messages it scrolls through every email in the inbox on the server. This uses data and the more emails there are in your inbox the more data is used. There is an option, but managed from your device, to delete any emails in your server inbox when they reach a week old. Failing to do this, as I know to my cost, also means that if you don’t use your Pilot for a period of time but continue to use Mailasail on wifi or phone data, emails will accumulate in your inbox on the server that, the next time you use the Pilot, will be downloaded to your device even though you have already received them from other internet connections. I mentioned earlier that it is reasonable to have to switch on the Pilot before using it. It is absolutely imperative that you switch it off again the second you have finished using it. If you don’t the connection with your device will continue and the device will do whatever devices do normally when connected to the internet. If the Pilot happens to be in default mode the device will carry on with all the background functions that have not been switched off. On 1st March I left the Pilot switched on by mistake for about two hours and by 3rd March I had used 49MB at a cost of $488. Five months worth of plan data!! Mailasail has kindly said it will investigate with AST. I think I know what the response will be. I have another example with Vodafone to illustrate the point. When returning to South Africa I forgot to switch off my mobile phone which also had data roaming activated. During the flight it automatically connected with the Emirates on board wifi. On arrival in Dubai I already had £72 of additional charges added to my Vodafone account despite not using my phone at all on the flight. I contacted Vodafone by chat and explained what had happened. I was told to wait until the monthly account was raised and then I could see exactly what I had been charged for. I simply couldn’t make her understand that it wasn’t the detail I was concerned about, it was the principle of actually being charged. As she said, the Vodafone system keeps a meticulous record of all data usage and there was no chance of it being wrong. She had neither the training nor the comprehension and certainly not the discretion to discuss anything beyond the computer system with which we must abide. I have had similar run ins with Talk Talk and BT. “The Computer Says No!” My point is these corporations could easily introduce safeguards as default settings to prevent these unwanted charges being incurred. The fact that they don’t and have default settings that benefit themselves rather than the consumer is a scam that needs to be addressed. |