Ed Lasher has a simple way to measure how cool his job is—he just counts how many people have offered to carry his bags on a service call. Lasher is the owner of YachtComputing LLC, a small IT business with a very exclusive niche: installing and maintaining networks and Internet connectivity aboard “superyachts,” seagoing mansions owned by wealthy individuals and charter companies. “It’s a distinct category—bigger than yachts, bigger than mega-yachts,” said Lasher. “It’s the very top end of the private yachting industry.”

Lasher, a former banker with an MBA in finance, works out of Miami, Florida. He traded in the suit and tie some time ago; his work uniform now is a company polo shirt, jeans, and (usually) bare feet—shoes aren’t yacht-work friendly. But he didn’t originally set out to be an IT gypsy of the high seas. Lasher started doing tech work as a partner in a consulting firm, installing networks for business customers.

In 1999, the firm picked up a new customer—a company that specialized in high-tech, high-end audio and video suites for super-yachts. That connection would change his business unexpectedly. In 2001, that customer had trouble with an IT vendor they had recommended for a project in Holland.

So they called in Lasher to finish the project: installing a network and satellite Internet access on the Detroit Eagle, a 153-foot long, three-deck motor yacht being built for Roger Penske. (Penske sold the yacht and bought another a few years ago. The Detroit Eagle, since renamed Sea Racer, is currently up for sale—and the asking price is just shy of $30 million.)

At the time, Lasher says, he didn’t know a thing about satellite communications, but he managed to complete the project well enough that it got noticed. “My introduction to the industry was a very high-end boat,” he said. “The industry is a tight community where everyone talks to everyone.” So he got called to build out more and more networks—on larger and larger boats.

He liked the niche, so he turned his focus more and more towards the yachting side. In 2003, after splitting with his consulting partner, he formed YachtComputing LLC. The yacht IT business “is a niche that supports what I call the craftsman service model,” Lasher said. Today, he only has two remaining land-based customers.

From 64kbps to 4Mbps

Lasher’s clients are people who want to be just as connected at sea as they are in the office. That desire has made his expertise in demand. “I wish I could say that I planned for this success,” he said. He owes a lot of it to the changes in commercial satellite networking—and the insatiable digital habits of his customer base.

“On the first boat I did, the idea of high-speed satellite at the time was 64 kilobits per second at $8 a minute, so the business problem was to maximize your utilization of a very slow connection.” But the evolution of commercial VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) technology has changed that, with satellite providers offering fixed-price, unlimited use connections with speeds ranging up to 4Mbps. “It completely changed the dimensions of the problem,” he said.

While the amount of bandwidth available at sea has increased, so has the demand. “Now the problem is that everybody has iPads, iPhones, tablets, laptops, and streaming video connections,” said Lasher, “and you have to control the utilization of that online-all-the-time connection. You have slower throughput than most of the world expects, and you have to make it look as fast as what they have at the office.”

With guests, crewmembers, and various shipboard systems competing for chunks of limited bandwidth, part of what Lasher does in configuring broadband access for his customers includes throttling and filtering what’s going over the connection—and screening what’s coming back. His typical shipboard network includes a Kerio Control firewall, which he configures to filter and prioritize network traffic passing through the VSAT link. The firewall also provides antivirus protection and network monitoring, and a VPN connection that allows his company to perform remote maintenance and support when customers are cruising.

But maintaining the illusion of perpetual connectivity isn’t always easy. The VSAT systems Lasher works with need to be fine-tuned to stay locked on the satellite they get their service from; and just like anything else with moving parts, they occasionally have idiosyncrasies. “When you have an impending charter trip [and] the charter guests have spent anywhere from $350,000 to $500,000 for the trip plus gas plus food, they’re not going to be happy if they find out that the VSAT isn’t working,” Lasher mused. “You end up in Amsterdam dangling at the end of a cable in a boatswain’s chair in a 45-mile-an-hour wind trying to fix the issue.”

The types of antennas Lasher works with are slaved to the yacht’s navigation system and to an internal GPS to keep them trained on the right spot in the sky. They’re also gyro-stabilized, with an internal gyro similar to the one in Apple’s iPhone, he said. Usually placed at the top of a mast, the rocking and pitching of the yacht can whip the antenna around and knock it out of alignment with the satellite.

So having to go up into the antenna’s dome and replace stabilization components is a common task—one that requires suppressing a fear of heights. “Last week I was in Jacksonville, Florida on a yacht, looking around from up in the dome, and I was above the top of the span (of the Dames Point Bridge, which is 175 feet above the St. John’s River). It was a little daunting.”

Going aloft aside, “95 percent of what we’re doing is inside a gorgeous air-conditioned house that just happens to float,” Lasher admitted. And the technology he works with aboard isn’t all that much different than what you’d use ashore—albeit with a little more shock protection. “We will use more solid state hard drives than the average person,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s a fairly equipment-friendly environment.”

Being a craftsman means that Lasher can keep his company small. Upgrading or repairing existing installations usually only requires a very limited number of people; when Lasher gets a larger project, such as a network installation on a newly built boat, he’ll contract out for cable installation and focus his attention on the systems integration and programming.

The super-yacht IT business comes with a very long commute. “The nice thing is I’ve gotten the opportunity to see places I probably would have never traveled to myself,” Lasher said. About one trip, he said, “the bad news is that I had to work near Christmas, but the good news was I was in Florence, Italy for Christmas Eve.”

Work on new yachts during their construction takes Lasher to where their shipyards are—primarily Holland, Germany, and Italy. An increasing number—such as the 463-foot S/Y Dream Symphony, the largest private sailing yacht ever constructed—are being built in Turkey. But for yachts that are already afloat, he travels even further afield.

Usually, his work is done while a yacht is dockside somewhere. But Lasher says that 25 percent of the time—in the case of an outage or other circumstances—he follows the yachts to where they travel—which is often in the Caribbean during the winter, and the Mediterranean or Ionian Sea during the summer. Lasher also has customers in the South Pacific, “so I’ve been to Papua New Guinea, and all over Southeast Asia,” he added. One new installation called for a trip to Tahiti—where flight schedules forced him to stay an extra day and get in some snorkeling with humpback whales.

In one case, where an owner was buying a boat, Lasher and a team working with him had to meet the yacht in Athens, where it was moored. Then the owner and buyer took the boat out to international waters to close the deal offshore. “When it was closed, the owners jumped on a cigarette boat and headed back to Athens,” he said, “and we spent the next three days pulling cables while the yacht sailed to Cannes.”

It’s a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.