Page 19: of Marine News Magazine (January 2019)
Passenger Vessels & Ferries
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the term used all the time “virtual ATON,” and there are subsets there. Our intention is not to replace a lot of physical
ATON’s with AIS ATON or virtual ATON. We have seen some very strategically deployments of electronic ATON,
AIS ATON, in the wake of hurricanes to get shipping back open, etc. Right now today, I think, we’ve got just shy of 400 what we call “AIS ATON,” there’s a physical piece, and the physical piece is actually a physical ATON with AIS right there, organic in the ATON. It’s self-contained. Then we have what you call a synthetic ATON. Of those, about 390 are synthetic, so that is a physical ATON, but you could remotely signal the AIS signal from that location. And then
I think the one that maybe mariners tend to default to and sort of say, oh, “the sky is falling,” is the virtual ATON where there’s not actually a physical ATON there, you’re just projecting a signal from a remote location. We’ve used that virtual ATON to reconstitute waterways in the after- math of storms. It is not our goal to use electronic ATON/
AIS ATON to drive down the physical inventory. There are some places that might lend itself to that. We’re looking at how to embrace technology to build some resiliency into the system. That’s the real bene