[SatNews] German ship manager Phoenix Reederei reports that its average monthly satellite expenses have dropped more than €1,000 per ship since installing Iridium OpenPort(r) satellite terminals on five of its vessels. Iridium Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: IRDM) offers the Iridium OpenPort maritime satellite service to meet the rising demand for cost-effective, high-bandwidth communications for ships at sea.

Iridium OpenPort is an IP-based system that offers a combination of up to three independent phone lines and a separate data circuit with scalable rates to 128 kbps. The compact, lightweight Iridium OpenPort antenna has no moving parts and is easy and inexpensive to install. Otesat-Maritel, an Iridium service partner, provided the Iridium OpenPort terminals and service plans for the Phoenix ships. Nordic-IT Marine was responsible for the installation and commissioning of the systems. Phoenix has interfaced the Iridium OpenPort terminals to its gate4c IP shipboard gateway servers, which provide communication optimization, firewalls, least-cost routing and compression software. mareData GmbH, a German IT research and development company, developed the gate4c hardware and software package to meet Phoenix’s requirements.