SeaBridge Duo: WLAN bridge increasing offshore mobility

Due to the proliferation of numerous light weight devices along with the wide spread use of WLAN technology connectivity is getting more and more important. Coverage is continuously increasing except in areas with low population density as well as at sea. Nevertheless, at sea people also want to stay connected on the go. Moreover they want to use their mobile devices with the same convenience that they enjoy at home. In this paper we present a product dedicated to provide boat enthusiasts with internet connectivity and homelike WLAN usage, with strong coverage and without the need to reconfigure each of the used devices when the location of the boat changes. In more detail an affordable WLAN bridge connecting an onboard WLAN with an onshore internet access point is described, which allows technical laymen to connect several onboard devices by WLAN and to use performant uplink and downstream capacities. In addition the whole system can be configured easily using an smartphone app.