Ships need to be able to function independently over long distances.

This place enormous demands on the reliability of on-board electronics, including navigation, drives and control. Optimum planning of maintenance times is also needed, firstly to ensure complete reliability while at sea and secondly for cost-effective ship operation. The appropriate infrastructure for connecting to this power supply is needed.

CAT7 Ethernet

Category 7 cable, more commonly known as a Cat7 or Cat-7 cable, is a type of high-end data transfer patch cable used in delivering the core infrastructure of wired Gigabit Ethernet setups. It’s a shielded twisted pair cable, used principally in achieving high-speed Ethernet connections at data transfer rates of 1 Gbps or higher between directly linked servers, switches and computer networks.

Serial Bus Network (RS422, etc)

RS422 was introduced to enable higher data rates to be transferred over serial data lines that was possible with RS232. It also able to provide data rates of up to 10Mbps at distances up to 50 feet (15.24 metres). However, using reduced data rates RS422 is able to transmit data over distances of 4000 feet (~1220 metres); the maximum 100kbps at this distance. The key reason why RS422 is able to achieve these improvements results from the use of differential or balanced transmission techniques.

FDDI Fiber Networking

Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) is a standard for data transmission in a local area network. It uses optical fiber as its standard underlying physical medium, although it was also later specified to use copper cable, in which case it may be called CDDI, standardized as TP-PMD, also referred to as TP-DDI.