Cheap connectivity could be incredible. Current sat systems are expensive and coverage is interesting.
IoT and autonomy offer the potential cost saving measures to get the investment from some of the most frugal operators.
I mean, besides providing better connectivity for people on ships, what will/can change? What was blocked in building out by current satellite offerings?
Why wouldn’t it be?
However I have no idea of good it is at wave and currents.
Right now data sizes of an email are industry standard. As you go into 100s of Mb you start to see people really struggle.
I would look at BIM systems for a parallel with ships. Ships are incredibly complicated and often self reliant. Shore based monitoring is hated by the crew but vessel operators see return from it.
A simple example would be an extension of the IoT devices already on board probably around engines. Anything with tangible benefits to Efficiency and safety would see investment.
For fleet owners, no matter if for ships, cars/trucks or planes, management becomes way easier if they have global high bandwidth data uplink: you can detect stuff like engine or other part wear early by running big data analysis on telemetry, and in disaster case you have way better logs to operate on (both post mortem and during troubleshooting).
This by the way also is relevant for car manufacturers - with the exception of Tesla, the only way classic car manufacturers get information on how their cars are used in the real world comes from test drivers, accident reports and shop visits. Consistent data uplinks allow for a lot more telemetry that can be used to improve their products.
Surprisingly, even scientists can benefit from this - have ships transmit real-time data about air pressure, sunlight, wave height etc. and suddenly you have a global network of floating data buoys.
There are already temperature and tamper devices for sensitive freight. There are devices that will show if orientation has changed or if shock occurred etc.
Sensitive freight is an entire industry that has already innovated around the lack of connectivity.
That's not to say there isn't further innovation to be made.
Tiltguard stickers or how were they called... about the most useless bullshit I've seen. Back when I worked in stage lighting, many cases had these affixed... and you can guess what every shift leader had in their pocket: yep, a load of replacement ones.
Shipping is one thing -- the company still owns the goods. But keep this out of my cars.
At best, it might be cheaper than what is currently on the market, but that expense is largely driven by durability requirements for equipment exposed to heavy amounts of moisture and inclement weather. Durable products are not something that any of Musk's companies are known for (especially Tesla), so they enter this market with the disadvantage of that reputation.
Starlink is not Tesla, and from my study of the /r/starlink subreddit, there have not been any significant complaints about the dish reliability, even in the bitter snow and cold
Shipping already does everything that Starlink proponents claim Starlink will enable, i.e., track ships, track cargo, track temperatures in containers. And this data isn't like video, so you don't need a lot of bandwidth for it.
Starlink might make things cheaper than current satellite communications offerings, but this is evolutionary not revolutionary.
On a ocean going cargo ship, that is not that much relative to the other costs.
Improvement for sure, and I'd bet on StarLink making a lot of money on this by volume, but it's not going to radically change shipping.