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The CBC reports: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/navy-warship-wifi-1.4481346
The Canadian navy has dropped what its top sailor called the "draconian" policy on the technology and has embarked on a program to install Wi-Fi on each of its warships.
"There are other navies that operate with NATO that have Wi-Fi in far more spaces than we do." said Vice-Admiral Ron Lloyd, commander of the Royal Canadian Navy. "And we're saying 'No you can't have it aboard' — period? That's crazy."
The U.S. navy began installing 4G LTE networks aboard its ships in 2012, while Canadian sailors have over the same period of time been forced to stow their cellphones while at sea — particularly when in secured areas — and rely on the occasional satellite phone conversation with family at home.
Those infrequent chats conducted through "morale phones" were largely dependant on the warship's jammed-up operational network.
Chief Petty Officer 1st Class Michel Vigneault was amazed to see, for the very first time, a sailor having a Facetime conversation with family back home on a smartphone. The moment neatly captured the conundrum he and the top brass have faced in making the navy, which has for a decade been perpetually short of sailors, an appealing place to work. The moment encapsulated two issues: the longstanding prohibition on Wi-Fi coverage aboard warships and the amount of time sailors are away from home.
Both have become central to the retention and recruiting makeover that is underway as part of the Liberal government's recently introduced defence strategy.
The ban on Wi-Fi was an obvious irritant.
"I realized then how important it is. Maybe not for my generation, because we didn't grow up with that, but for younger sailors, being connected is very, very important," Vigneault told CBC News is a recent interview. "Everything we can do to enable that for the benefit of the sailor and his or her family is very, very important."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @07:32AM
Worrying about wifi signals on a warship is like worrying about the brightness of 10W bulbs next to a bonfire and super bright search lights. These aren't nuclear submarines that mostly sneak about blind with no active sonar or active anything.
Warships often have some radar on even if it's not their "war mode" fancy high powered radar. Whether the crew notices stuff is a different matter ;), but the radar will be blasting in the order of kilowatts. That can go to megawatts when the "war mode" radar is used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-1 [wikipedia.org]
Then there's the comms stuff which is also in the order of kilowatts.
They might switch to stealth mode in which case if they can fully turn off the radar[1] and HF etc comms, they can turn off the wifi.
[1] Some radars can still emit significant RF while nonactive.