Talk about Get Real Get Better. This initiative is more than a game changer – it’s a life changer.

Limited network access has long affected Sailors serving aboard ships, causing frustration and dissatisfaction not only on the job, but also in their daily lives. In the short time that Abraham Lincoln’s personnel have been participating in the pilot, it’s already made a vast difference.

The result of collaborative efforts by Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR); Commander, Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet (COMNAVAIRPAC); Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services (PEO Digital); and Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (PEO C4I), Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore aims to improve Sailors' digital lives by making online connections for both work and play easier and more secure.

Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore is made possible by Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (P-LEO), which provides satellite-based capabilities responsible for revolutionizing internet access aboard ships.

Though the initiative is complex, the desire is simple: provide a high level of service by bringing modern internet speeds to ships and using it to transform quality of work and quality of life for Sailors at sea.

Combat Systems Officer Cmdr. Kevin White, who sat down with CHIPS in March to discuss the improvements Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore has brought about, said leadership aboard Abraham Lincoln has concentrated on how to enable a safe use of Wi-Fi for Sailors personal use while intermingling with their daily military operations, noting that Sailors will now be able to continue with their lives while they’re deployed.

“You lose all access to your personal life, and that affects people – they’re concerned about how the issues in their personal lives that they just kind of left behind will be handled. With Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore, we can maintain the continuity of our personal lives,” White said. “What we've been able to do is transition Navy life to be more like home, and we can see onboard the ship that everybody is happier.”

This initiative has provided the “the biggest shift in off-ship connectivity since we started using email back in the mid-90s ... while we have had internet access at sea for a while now, this is the first time I've seen it implemented in a way that is relevant to Sailors’ needs,” Rear Adm. Kevin P. Lenox, Commander, Carrier Strike Group Three, wrote in an email shared with CHIPS.

According to White, the Sailors are happy to comply with safe usage practices, including only using their phones in designated locations.

“So far, they're adhering to that,” White said. “We also walk around [to observe], and we use leadership to ensure that the Sailors’ work products, when they're on watch, or they're on duty, are [meeting] that high standard.”

The lines between work and personal lives are blurred on a ship – especially one like Abraham Lincoln. An aircraft carrier is often compared to a small city, and no wonder – there are around 3,000 Sailors onboard, each living their own lives while sharing a large, albeit contained, space.

Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore has also made it possible to create a personal space, so to speak.

“When they're off duty, they're just living their lives as they normally would, whether at home or on the ship,” White said. “They couldn’t do that before – it's an amazing thing.”

White also discussed how Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore can provide network transport for tactical and business applications aboard Abraham Lincoln.

Tactical applications, he noted, are at higher classification levels and encrypted; many are already designed to work with commercial internet.

“The fact that we're not making use of that opportunity with modern technology to allow classified tactical applications to ride the commercial internet is where we are missing out, so we built Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore to be able to do that in the future,” White said. “We're close to demonstrating a couple of those applications, and I am fully confident it will be game changing.”

Business applications, on the other hand, are unclassified – but no less critical.

“There’s a strong correlation to our combat effectiveness based on our ability to interoperate with our business applications,” White said.

Ordering parts and fuel, managing aviation maintenance databases, you name it – Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore has made the process smoother.

“We're not waiting for the normal ship systems to kind of catch up as they work with shore through these same low bandwidth data pipes,” White said. “It all works when we can also increase our footprint of usable space to be able to do these things on Wi-Fi because we're not dependent on a network drop that may or may not be there.”

Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore also enables Sailors to access business applications using any device, enabling increased access beyond current capabilities.

“Sailors have access to broadband speeds for communication with family and friends, off-duty education, banking, music downloads and the countless other requirements of a connected society,” Lenox wrote, noting that the benefits in “Sailor morale and resiliency” greatly exceed the efforts needed to overcome operational security and leadership challenges.

This initiative has also changed the way Sailors use business applications, from managing their careers and personnel records to completing training and receiving healthcare, White said, noting that the carrier’s medical and dental department use it for updating records, triaging and even treating patients in real time.

“They're using Wi-Fi to pull up studies and calling major hospitals on the shoreside to say, ‘Here's what we’ve got going on, could I get a second opinion?’ We could never really do that efficiently before, and a lot of it is our ability to do talking and texting protocols through Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore,” White said.

Sailors are able to reap the benefits in other ways, too – attending religious services, participating in counseling and even taking college courses – all using their device of choice.

“I've had people defending PhD theses from Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore,” White said.

Many perks – once only dreamed of – have become reality thanks to Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore, and yet the most beloved might just be the Super Bowl party that took place aboard Abraham Lincoln back in February.

“We took a little bit of a risk. When you plan to put out an event like this, there's some risk in that because you risk failing, but with this project, we've always had the idea of let's fail early, and if we fail, let's fail smarter,” White said, noting that he had some backup Super Bowl feeds – “the low definition stuff” – if it didn’t work out.

There were a lot of moving parts, both literally and figuratively.

While at sea, White and his team outfitted Hangar Bay 1 with temporary wireless access, and then they moved aircraft from Hangar Bay 2 and into Hangar Bay 1 and Hangar Bay 3.

The Super Bowl party took place in Hangar Bay 2, with food, popcorn stands, games, a massive sound system, rows upon rows of chairs, and “lots of areas for people to congregate and just be themselves,” White said.

The team made a roughly 300-inch screen of the white Hangar Bay door, which was closed, and used a projector to project the game onto the makeshift screen.

To be on the safe side, they used a computer with a wired connection.

“I didn't want to do wireless just in case it would be bombarded by everybody else on Wi-Fi, so I provided a wired connection to a normal computer,” White explained. They hooked the computer up to the projector and chose a TV streaming service to air the game – just a regular TV streaming service, no different from one used on land.

“Using the technology that Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore provides, I gave the computer a guaranteed bandwidth connection,” White said. “We had a rock-solid Super Bowl feed in the Hangar Bay at the same time as we had 1,800 users on Wi-Fi.”

And it worked. Not only did it work – it went off without a hitch. The San Francisco 49ers vs. the Kansas City Chiefs; the half-time show with Usher; the clever, often hilarious commercials – around 800 Sailors experienced it all in a way they’d only previously been able to do ashore.

“You could tell there was a lot of passion for each of the teams, and they were able to just be in the moment. However, they were having that experience with their friends and peers, rooting for their teams,” White said.

The party also gave Sailors a chance to relax and unwind while playing games, throwing footballs, noshing on popcorn and partaking in non-alcoholic beer (which was housed in the engine canister for an F-18 fighter jet filled with ice).

White said the success of the Super Bowl party demonstrated that their team can perform in the same way with “any type of traffic, [any] theater or any type of sensitive data.”

“We can do that at the same time as we provide wireless and other types of data. We can tailor it, tune it and shape it. So that's pretty cool,” White said.

Pretty cool, indeed.