Company Feature: SMSGlobal, The Importance of Crew Welfare

article_04_SMSGlobal

A serious concern for anyone working at sea is bridging the distance with their families and friends. Seafarers spend approximately 20 days each month in the middle of a vast ocean. Personal communication with loved ones at home for an affordable cost has been and still is a challenge.

Crew welfare is an area whose importance has been growing rapidly the last decade as it has become more and more difficult to attract and keep qualified workforce. Being able – in their free time – to surf the Internet and communicate with family and friends has been proven to be an important factor in helping to attract and keep crew members.

SMSGlobal was founded in 2003 to address this growing demand, and the company introduced the first universal 2-way SMS text messaging and crew E-mail service for seafarers.

In 2011 SMSGlobals Crew Communication system was installed on 2,500 vessels and used by 80,000 seafarers messaging with over 700,000 contacts on-shore.

A growing number of ship owners have the last years upgraded their communication systems to V-sat and Fleet Broadband. SMSGlobals system has accordingly been developed to offer a complete Internet Café facility for the crew’s; IT secure Web Browsing, Online Chatting with all major IM networks such as MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, Google, ICQ and AIM, a World-News service in 14 multilingual editions, Announcement Board for the ship owners, Free crew E-mail & Free crew SMS world-wide. All features are included in one software application that can run on the shared PC on board and on the laptops that the crew’s bring with them on board.

The advantages for ship owners to use SMSGlobals system is to have an environment where they ensure full cost/usage control, bandwidth control, configurable data limitations, IT security against downloads, viruses and corrupted files. At the same time the ship owners can offer their crews contact with their family and loved ones together with optimized internet features as experienced in an Internet Café on shore.

SMSGlobal has established offices in Hong Kong, Philippines and the Netherlands to support its products to the Asian, American and European markets, and works hand in hand with over 800 telecom operators world-wide integrating various state-of-the-art technologies.

SMSGlobal have distribution agreements with some of the biggest maritime industry service providers: Stratos Global, Satcom Group, Dualog, Bejing Marine and SeaSecure.

For more information: www.smsglobal.net