By Casper Kleiman, Product Marketing Manager at VBH

Imagine your yacht was built in 2009, just 10 years ago, when there were no iPads and the Apple Store had only just opened. Think about how times have changed! It’s now an everyday thing to stream music or play games on your phone or watch your favourite series and movies on your iPad. Your phone and tablet are a gateway to a practically infinite amount of information, while your favourite apps link to incredibly powerful cloud services, all through the internet.

That hypothetical 2009 yacht probably didn’t have the option of allowing multiple people to use the internet in any location. Fortunately, 2019 is a whole other ball game!

At VBH, we do more and more IT upgrades of boats, allowing people to enjoy world-class internet on classic yachts. This makes for a very noticeable difference in the quality of life onboard, which is more fun when you can quickly find information on the internet, check the latest news, chat with friends and family or share your latest jet ski adventure with your followers without hassle. It’s the little things that matter – like enjoying your carefully curated playlists and your favourite movies or having a good laugh with your friends while watching funny videos on YouTube.

So how do you make this change happen? You replace parts of the IT network, increase the number of access points (improving Wi-Fi coverage) and get a better internet subscription. And presto! People can enjoy fast, quality internet anywhere on the yacht.

The actual procedure will be different for each yacht, as every yacht is built with a different philosophy and system. To know what needs to be done, we start with a survey of the facilities and your wishes related to the internet. A one-day visit to your yacht usually suffices for us to figure out the design, give us an overview of the required hardware, software and subscriptions, and provide us with most of the information we need to create an action plan and define a timeline.

By liaising with the captain and crew, we can figure out the best time to carry out the intervention with minimal interruption to your yacht’s schedule.

If you’re interested in what an IT upgrade could do for your yacht, please give us a call. We’d love to hear what you’d like to offer your owner and guests – and can work with you to make that a reality down to the smallest details!