Going Global

“Over the coming weeks,” Inmarsat says, “the Inmarsat Operations Team will raise I-5 F3 to its final orbit, deploy its solar arrays and reflectors, and undertake payload testing. At the end of these procedures, I-5 F3 will be ready to join the first two GX satellites,which are already in orbit and operating successfully, to create the first, globally available, high-speed mobile broadband network delivered by a single operator. ” It’s clearly a momentous sense of achievement for Inmarsat CEO Rupert Pearce, who notes: “We have been working towards this day ever since we announced plans to create the Global Xpress constellation in 2010. I am delighted thwwat we now have three Global Xpress satellites in orbit, enabling us to provide global GX services by the end of the year. ” Inmarsat’s Peltola later clarified to Australian Aviation that it is “currently in talks with airlines worldwide about Global Xpress and the first carriers are likely to adopt the new service in early 2016. ” Inmarsat Aviation president Leo Mondale summed up the prospectsfor airlines and passengers after successful satellite testing earlier this year: “With GX Aviation, airlines and their passengers can finally experience a connectivity service equivalent to what they are used to on the ground. Just having Wi-Fi on board is no longer a differentiator – in the future it will be about the quality of the service. Everyone is talking about the ‘connected aircraft’ or ‘e-enabled aircraft’ – until now this has just been a vision because no-one has had access to a true fast internet service. GX Aviation changes all that. We will set the standards for broadband in the sky. ” It’s a big claim, and the verdict will be judged by airline and business aviation customers.

“Inmarsat is in discussions with airlines throughout the world and we anticipate a number of major announcements before the close of the year,” Inmarsat’s Peltola confirmed to Australian Aviation. “These include airlines that fly to Australia and New Zealand. ” The satellite operator wouldn’t be drawn into naming those airlines, though, saying: “As these discussions are commercially confidential, we are unable to confirm with which airlines we’re in negotiations. ” In commercial terms, a key part of the A$2. 2 billion business case behind Inmarsat’s Ka-band Global Xpress satellite constellation is airline use on a global scale. I-5 F3 is the third of three satellites that are required for global coverage.

“Each of the three Inmarsat-5 satellites uses fixed narrow spot beams to deliver higher speeds through more compact terminals,” explains satellite manufacturer Boeing, which also provides military Ka-band plus commercial Global

We will set the standards for broadband in the sky.

Xpress services as part of the operational testing of the network. “Steerable beams direct additional capacity in real-time to where it’s needed to provide seamless, global broadband communications coverage to Inmarsat users worldwide on land, at sea, and in the air. ” Boeing is also building a fourth satellite, I-5 F4, for redundancy and to add capacity in areas of high demand, and confirmed that the delivery window for F4 is mid-2016.

Inmarsat launched the first Global Xpress satellite, I-5 F1, in early December 2012, and it now orbits the Indian Ocean region. It is this satellite that Inmarsat, Boeing, antenna-maker and aviation terminal provider Honeywell, and others have been using for initial tests, government contracts, and a small number of regional maritime missions. The second satellite, I-5 F2, recently finished manoeuvring into place to cover the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean after its launch on February 1 this year.

“The demand for constant high-speed connectivity in the aviation industry in this day and age is non-negotiable. Business jets, commercial airliners and their passengers want access to a quality broadband service at all times,” says Inmarsat’s Mondale.

“Inmarsat has a proven history of delivering a trusted, reliable service to the cockpit. We’re applying this knowledge to our GX Aviation services, scheduled to be available later this year, giving our customers a high-quality, consistent and reliable broadband service to the cabin as well. ” The I-5 F3 launch wasn’t without concern, though, not least over the Proton-Breeze launch platform. The platform belongs to US-Russian multinational InternationalLaunch Services (ILS), which is the inheritor of the old Soviet space program. It operates the Proton-M first stage rocket, the Breeze-M upper stage booster, and the Baikonur cosmodrome in western Kazakhstan. I-5 F3 was expected to be launched in May, yet the timetable was delayed after a Proton rocket carrying the Mexican Centenario communications satellite failed eight minutes into its flight on May 16.

Compounding concerns, just weeks later on June 28, an International Space Station resupply mission by competitor SpaceX aboard a Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated just over two minutes after launch. Investigations revealed that a strut securing a helium bottle inside the second stage liquid oxygen tank had failed, and caused the helium pressurisation system to fail, flooding the liquid oxygen tank with helium and overpressurising it to the point of explosion.

Falcon 9 is a key part of the critical path towards the development of the Falcon Heavy system, which is already planned to launch commercial aviation communications satellites, including the Ka-band ViaSat-2 from Inmarsat competitor ViaSat, and the failure was a significant setback not just to that program but to space launches as a whole. “Space is hard,” tweeted International Space Station commander Scott Kelly, summing up the events of mid-2015 in 13 characters.

With a limited number of launch platforms for payloads the size of modern communication satellites, the return of the Proton-Breeze launch platform to service will be a significant relief to the satellite industry as a whole, but particularly for Inmarsat and its customers, including a large number of commercial aviation players.

Airlines are likely to be beating down the doors of Inmarsat’s offices for a slot to install the new system.

Airlines flying across the Pacific, which is the region over which the I-5 F3 is to orbit, will be particularly interested in what is now set to be a truly global communications network.

Inmarsat’s approach to making Global Xpress operational has included a significant number of partners, many of which are already operating in this space on narrower bands and have existing customer bases which can be shifted to the much faster Ka-band system.

Honeywell Aerospace is a key partner in delivering GlobalXpress over its JetWave satellite communications terminals, and has been conducting tests this year with its airborne Boeing 757-200 testbed, N757HW, using the I-5 F1 satellite. Honeywell is also a key reseller of the product for the business aviation market, including through ARINC Direct, SITA OnAir, Satcom Direct, Satcom1 and Aircell.

“The first phase of tests were completed in June 2015 and included streaming YouTube videos and live radio, online conference calls, downloading files and more – validating GX Aviation’s ability to deliver high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity while over land and water. The tests demonstrated a successful connection between the JetWave hardware and Inmarsat’s first Global Xpress satellite, I-5 F1,” Inmarsat’s Peltola explains.

For commercial aviation, though, key to the rollout is SITA OnAir and its existing customer base. “SITA OnAir has nearly 400 airline customers operating over 14,000 aircraft, all of which can benefit from the super-fast broadband GX Aviation network, providing 50 Mbps to the aircraft,” Katrina Korzenowski, SITA OnAir’s director AIRCOM, Asia Pacific, tells Australian Aviation.

Inmarsat currently expects to be offering an operational Global Xpress system for airline customers by the end of this year, which are likely to be beating the doors of Inmarsat’s London offices down for a slot to install the new system.

So far, those customers include Air Caraibes, Qatar Airways and Vietnam Airlines, but there is a massive latent demand, both from airlines with existing narrowband communication systems and from carriers that have not yet taken the leap into inflight connectivity – such as Qantas, Virgin Australia and Air New Zealand.

Driving the latent demand for high-speed Ka-band inflight connectivity internally are the operational benefits around maintenance, repair, overhaul, scheduling, crewing and inflight efficiency, which numerous airlines are seeing already. But even more demand is coming from passengers, whose experience both with no connectivity and with slower systems is a serious negative for airlines.

Clearly, an airline like Emirates which offers $1 connectivity to an A380-ful of people over anL-band narrowband satellite link – with all the “it’s free, but it’s slow” experience of trying to fit a fire hydrant of demand through a hosepipe of supply – realises the need to offer connectivity.

That passenger demand has only been stoked by the experience of travellers within the United States, where jetBlue’s ViaSat Exede-based Ka-band system (which the airline brands as FlyFi) provides a double-digit Mbps experience at its free level, plus streaming video and VPN access on its US$9/hour paid tier. United Airlines has also installed the same ViaSat system on its nearly 300 Boeing 737 aircraft, which it operates on domestic and regional routes, despite the domestic US coverage limitations of the ViaSat-1 satellite. Making comparisons within the same spectrum band is deeply complex, and the roles of internet service providers, connectivity partners, spot-beam locations, coverage areas, antennae variations, atmospheric conditions, satellite skew angle, and airline contracts cannot be understated. Yet Ka-band as a technology descriptor – in the same way that 4G as a more terrestrial comparator may mean different things but is generally seen as a positive technology improvement – is a big step over existing provisions. ViaSat’s product functions well, is appreciated by customers and has received plaudits from the industry and passengers alike.

The trick for Inmarsat will be to equal or exceed the ViaSat-1 experience with the three I-5 satellites. To do so, Inmarsat will combine narrow spot beams and additional steerable beams across the three satellites to maximise the capacity it can provide. Where there is more demand – in aviation terms, on the more trafficked routes – the steerable beams should be able to boost supply and increase capacity.

That capacity will further increase in areas of high demand (likely to be the Americas, North Atlantic and Europe) when the fourth 702HP-based I-5 satellite is launched. “The 702HP (high power) satellite is ideally suited for delivering the advanced capabilities Inmarsat required for this mission,” Mark Spiwak, president of Boeing Satellite Systems International, explains. “More than 20 of these 702HP spacecraft are in orbit now for customers, including Inmarsat, providing reliable, affordable and innovative service. ” “Inmarsat will progress towards global commercial service introduction of GX services by the end of 2015,” Inmarsat’s Peltola says, adding that “each Inmarsat-5 satellite is expected to have a commercial life of 15 years. ” Of course, the demand curve for satellite connectivity will only grow over that decade and a half. Think back to the monochrome dumbphones of the year 2000, and the way passengers’ expectations have changed in the years since the 2007 launch of the iPhone and the 2010 launch of the iPad. Even in the 2000s, airlines couldn’t see the purpose for the Connexion by Boeing satellite network, which folded in 2006 – the year before the iPhone. Meeting the demands of the future airline customer (and the airline’s passengers) requires a stroke of luck, a stroke of genius, or a little bit of both.