Aquaculture farms at the edge of coverage.
The cameras are offshore; the veterinarian is not — and the single weak carrier between them fails hardest exactly when a storm makes the feeds matter most. This mission is about breaking that correlation: two carriers and a metered satellite fallback in one bond, feeding control on a duplicated command class, and service boats that carry traffic the moment they come alongside.
Fish and mussel farm operators, aquaculture monitoring services, the veterinarians and insurers who depend on their feeds.
Cages sit at the ragged edge of shore cellular; one weak carrier cannot hold video and feeding control — and storms cut it when the stakes peak.
The platform bonds two carriers plus satellite under quota; feeding control rides a duplicated command class; service boats join the mesh alongside.
The feed barge’s existing control computer and the shore workstation. One Linux binary, one configuration file — no new mast, no appliance.
The mission
A salmon farm sits a few kilometres off a fjord-side village: a ring of cages, a feed barge, underwater cameras watching fish welfare and feed response, and a feeding system that a shore team steers through the day. The veterinarian reviews footage from an office an hour’s drive away; the insurer wants evidence, not assurances, about what happened during last month’s storm. Everything the farm knows about its stock travels over whatever signal reaches that stretch of water — and the site was chosen for currents and water quality, emphatically not for coverage.
What breaks
The edge of shore cellular is not a line but a fraying: one carrier at one bar, swinging with the weather, the sea state and the season. On that single thread the farm hangs two kinds of traffic that should never share a thin pipe — bulky camera video and small, critical feeding-system control. The video eats the link; the control stutters; and when a front comes through, the link drops entirely. That is the cruel correlation of this mission: the storm that takes the network down is the same storm that raises mortality risk, stresses the cages and makes the feeds most worth watching. The dropout and the stakes peak together.
The classical fixes fall short in familiar ways. A second link wired as manual failover still resets sessions in mid-storm, at the worst possible moment. Satellite left always-on solves the coverage and destroys the budget. And “check it from the boat tomorrow” is exactly the answer the veterinarian and the insurer will no longer accept.
The architecture on this mission
The feed barge runs one node bonding everything the site can reach: two shore carriers on the barge’s mast, and — where fitted — a satellite terminal under quota. All of it is one encrypted tunnel to the shore workstation, probed several times a second, with traffic weighted toward whichever path currently measures best. The two carriers do not fail identically: different cells, different geometry along the coast, different behaviour in weather. The bond harvests that difference continuously, and the satellite quota guarantees the expensive link is spent deliberately — with the standing rule that a quota never takes down the last usable path.
Traffic is classed so the thin moments hurt the right things. Feeding-system control rides the command class with a reserved floor, and as measured loss climbs, adaptive redundancy begins duplicating it across carriers — spending bandwidth on certainty exactly when the storm makes certainty scarce. Camera video aggregates across the carriers, elastic: it sheds quality first and recovers first. High-resolution welfare footage the veterinarian will want tomorrow is bulk — it queues on the barge and drains overnight or when links are fat. And when a service boat moors alongside, its node joins the mesh and its links join the way home: one more path, exactly when maintenance work makes the traffic heaviest.
How the storm week unfolds
- Ordinary operation. The bond carries the cameras across both carriers; feeding control sits on its reserved floor of a few kilobits. The dashboard ashore shows both links’ measured state — not a signal-bar guess from the barge.
- The vet’s review. Flagged footage travels high-class and is in the veterinarian’s office the same day; the full-resolution record drains as bulk behind it, without ever contending with control.
- The front arrives. The carriers degrade unevenly — one dies for minutes at a time, the other merely thins. Weight shifts continuously; adaptive redundancy escalates and feeding control now crosses on both carriers at once. No switchover event, no one on the barge in the weather.
- The worst hour. Both carriers are ragged. The satellite path, under quota, carries the control floor and thumbnail-rate video. Degradation is ordered — video coarsens, bulk waits, control does not flinch — and the farm is degraded, never dark.
- The morning after. The service boat comes alongside for damage checks and joins the mesh; the night’s queued footage drains through the recovering links while the crew works. The veterinarian reviews the storm’s footage before noon.
- The debrief. The journal holds a per-carrier, per-hour record of the storm: what each link did, what the satellite spent, when control ran duplicated. That artefact answers the insurer with data and sites the next farm’s antenna with evidence.
What each mechanism contributes
- Multi-carrier bonding — two shore carriers as one measured tunnel; their uncorrelated bad moments harvested continuously. Shipped.
- Metered-link quotas — the satellite fallback spent deliberately, never drained silently; never allowed to strand the last path. Shipped.
- Class floors with adaptive redundancy — feeding control reserved and duplicated as conditions worsen; video elastic; bulk patient. Shipped, opt-in.
- Mesh join for service boats — any equipped hull alongside becomes one more path home, automatically and by key. Shipped.
- Continuous measurement and the journal — a per-carrier record of every storm, for the insurer, the vet and the next site survey. Shipped.
The honest boundary: Atlas cannot conjure coverage over water the shore networks never reach, and it cannot keep an antenna mast standing in a gale — a site with genuinely no carrier signal needs the satellite link or a shore-side relay mast, both of which simply join the bond. The cages, the feeding decisions, the husbandry and the stock are yours.
What a pilot should prove
- Feeding-control continuity through the worst measured interval of a real storm, from the built-in journal.
- A month of side-by-side link records: each single carrier against the bond, at the same site.
- Satellite spend under quota for the period, alongside what the cellular bond carried for free.
- Same-day delivery of flagged welfare footage and overnight drain of the bulk record, timestamped by the journal.
One farm, two carriers, one storm season. The evaluation format covers the structure.