Marine Traffic, the popular live AIS website, has had a major upgrade. First released in 2007, Marine Traffic has grown to be the most popular vessel tracking service in the world, with a large network of contributors that have installed AIS receiving stations (like our AISNet product)  in their homes or offices.

During the past few months they have completed a full redesign of their website and mobile applications, with more data and many new features. A video that shows the new features can be viewed by clicking here.

While keeping the basic service free, they have introduced a number of paid plans, built for users that need to make intensive use of the system resources and wish to access the value-added services, such as:

• SAT-AIS  –  Satellite AIS data for global AIS coverage, including mid-ocean vessel tracking.
• Detailed Nautical Charts  –  global Nautical Charts for in-depth insight and situational awareness.
• Export AIS data  –  Export data to CSV files directly from the website.
• AIS API  –  Use MarineTraffic API data services to feed data directly into your applications.
• Historical AIS data  –  Retrieve historical AIS data within the billions of position records archived from 2009 onwards.

For Professional users they can now offer extended fleet management and notifications, via email and SMS alerting services.

Anyone who has an office or home near the sea (with an internet connection) who would like to contribute to Marine Traffic can use one of our AISNet Base Station units, which are easy to install and configure and just need a network connection to your wireless router and an external VHF antenna (mounted as high as possible) to receive the AIS transmissions.  Contributors to the Marine Traffic network, get free access to many of the paid services and if your area is not that well covered, you will be helping the whole community in improving the network of receiving stations.