July 21, 2011

Stratos BV, has purchased most of the operational assets of Blue Ocean Wireless Ltd. (BOW). BOW was a provider of shipboard GSM services that enabled crewmembers to use their personal GSM phones to communicate with family and friends by voice and SMS.

As part of the acquisition, Stratos assumes responsibility for providing services to most of BOW's customers, including many large commercial shipping companies worldwide. Since July 1, BOW customers have been receiving invoices directly from Stratos. Stratos will continue to market and sell BOW's services to existing and new customers, under the new brand

GSM Oceanwide.

Stratos has a strong reputation for providing ship managers with innovative crew-communications solutions, to support the recruitment and retention of well-trained seafarers. Increasingly, crew members are demanding the communications capabilities they have onshore, including the use of their own mobile devices for SMS and voice calling.

Stratos offers a variety of crew-welfare services to meet these needs, including GSM Oceanwide, prepaid Stratos ChatCards and AmosConnect Crew. Stratos also offers a wide range of value-added services to help ensure that shipmanagers achieve optimal performance, management control and cost efficiency of their crew-communications solutions.

"Today, more than ever, savvy shipmanagers understand that offering a wide range of communications options is critical to attracting and retaining qualified crewmembers," said Stratos President and CEO Jim Parm. "Each day we work with these shipmanagers to ensure they can offer advanced voice, private email, and SMS services that are powerful, easy to use and available away from the bridge."

Parm concluded, "Our acquisition of the BOW assets improves our ability to offer affordable GSM services to our global customer base."