Sky-Fi

“The ViaSat inflight Internet service leverages a global network of Ka-and Ku-band satellites with automatic satellite coverage handover to keep passengers connected no matter where they fly,” ViaSat vice president Don Buchman outlines to Australian Aviation.

“For passengers to connect to the inflight internet, they simply connect their device to the aircraft’s wireless network, which then communicates via several wireless access points to a ViaSat modem/server in the aircraft,” Buchman continues. “The modem connects to ViaSat’s advanced satellite antenna on the top of the fuselage to transmit data between the aircraft, satellites and ground-based gateway system to give passengers the freedom to shop, stream and enjoy a full internet connectivity experience – just like they have at home. ” Indeed, Buchman says, “the ViaSat inflight internet service offers unmatched speeds as the service taps an enormous amount of capacity from high capacity satellites (US – ViaSat-1 and ViaSat-2 in 2017; EMEA-Eutelsat’s KA-SAT and Australia’s NBN SkyMuster) – enabling airlines to give passengers access to stream internet content, browse the web at high speeds or VPN to their work-based productivity apps – at speeds comparable to ground-based infrastructure systems. ” Buchman highlights that the ViaSat solution is different to the Q Streaming Qantas already offers to personal electronic devices. “As an internet service provider, we offer access to the real internet, not cached content saved to a server on the plane. So for example: when a passenger is flying jetBlue in the US they access the ViaSat Exede Internet service, and when flying on Qantas in Australia, they will access the NBN Ka-band network. In all cases, the passenger can access the real internet to stream movies, music and content as they do at home,” Buchman explains.

Yet the Australian context is notably different to the United States in several key ways, particularly the externalities that neither ViaSat nor Qantas can control. Both companies are making promises about the passenger experience, yet neither is talking openly about the amount of capacity contracted on the 135 Gbps Sky Muster satellite, nor about whether that capacity is ring-fenced in anyway. Nor is NBN speaking openly.

ViaSat will install Ka-band for the 737-800 and hybrid Ka-Ku for the A330-200

Qantas will install two separate types of satellite connectivity system on its Boeing 737-800 and Airbus A330-200 fleet, respectively.

The 737-800s will receive a single Ka-band satellite antenna beneath a radome positioned on top of the aircraft towards the vertical stabiliser. This antenna will connect to one of the 101 spot beams on the NBN Sky Muster satellite, which sits at a 140° geosynchronous orbit 36,000km above Australia.

The A330-200 fleet, meanwhile, will receive a hybrid Ka-band/Ku-band satellite antenna beneath a similar radome in a similar location. These antennas can use either portion of the spectrum, enabling connectivity outside the 101 Sky Muster coverage zones across Australian territory and providing a backup when in Australia; and on services to Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Honolulu and Shanghai.

Don Buchman explains: “ViaSat’s hybrid Ku/Ka-band antenna technology enables Qantas to offer an inflight Wi-Fi service that can operate in both Ku-and Ka-band satellite networks on the same aircraft. By deploying ViaSat’s new hybrid Ku/Ka-band antenna Qantas can keep travellers connected virtually anywhere they fly, ensuring guests always have the best available connection in any given location. When on Ku- or Ka-band passengers have access to multiple connectivity features including web browsing, email and text, but when on the higher capacity satellite Ka-band, passengers have access to high-speed video streaming. ” There are exceptions, however: the Jetconnect ZK-registered 737-800 fleet will not be outfitted with either the Ka-band antenna, the hybrid Ka-Ku option, or even a simple Ku-band antenna. It’s also important to note that the principally international Airbus A330-300 fleet will not be outfitted.

And Qantas will be offering the service for free. “As a premium carrier, delivering value for money to our customers is extremely important to us. That’s why we’ll be offering access to Wi-Fi for free, on top of all the other things that are included when you fly Qantas,” CEO Alan Joyce said, signalling at his airline’s half yearly results press conference that Jetstar passengers might also see Wi-Fi connectivity, but at a price.

Satellite is in many ways the best Australian inflight connectivity option

As part of the background for Qantas’ ViaSat decision, the Australian context for inflight internet is different to elsewhere in the world. The United States, for example, has a different population density, settlement pattern, and a more populated interior than Australia. An existing network of ground connectivity backbone across the US, for example, was a key enabler for the US’ early adoption of the Gogo (then Aircell) Air To Ground (ATG) product, which is essentially a network of somewhere in the region of 160 cellular data towers pointing into the sky and connecting with antennas on the underside of aircraft. While light and quick to install, the system has a number of limitations, however.

The limitation of the 850 MHz ATG band used for this system means a total of 3. 1 Mbps per aircraft, although the ATG-4 solution (which essentially adds more antennas onto the aircraft) raises it to 9. 8 Mbps. Suitable, perhaps, for its 2008 début the year after the iPhone, but not really up to the task of connecting even narrowbody aircraft with 150-200 people on board. Further, the network of ground stations would need to be located in areas with power, fibre backbone and access, and be extensive enough to cover the entire prospective area of flight. Coverage can also extend only 150-250km over water without developing some form of offshore tower network (which has not yet been done). The end result: the significant capital investment and substantial uncertainty (not to mention the requirement to secure spectrum) means creating an ATG network would be difficult to justify in Australia.

Options outside the ATG range of options are satellites. The original 2001- era Connexion by Boeing system used Ku-band satellites – what Qantas will be using outside the NBN’s Ka-band coverage – but was five years ahead of its time, being cut in 2007, the year before the iPhone was introduced and revolutionised the way we communicate. Incremental improvements to antenna technology have boosted capacity to the aircraft, but it is the potential benefits from high-throughput satellites (HTS) now in the launch phase that promise significant improvements to the speed that Australian travellers see on the many airline Ku-band connections now available on flights to Australia. Most modern Ku-band antenna installations will be forward-compatible with HTS.

Inmarsat’s SwiftBroadband service, trialled by Qantas on Airbus A380s in 2012, was another early contender, but the glacial speed (432 kbps per channel, to a maximum of four channels) means it is essentially useless for the modern internet. Some low-capacity safety and operational applications, including flight tracking and ‘Internet of Things’ aircraft solutions, may also extend the life of this system.

Ka-band services, meanwhile, debuted on US airline jetBlue with a ViaSat solution in late 2013. Achieving impressive speeds, this is the new gold standard for connectivity. However, the system did encounter teething issues transferring between spot beam and wide beam areas, and congestion has occurred – though these issues have, largely, been resolved.

So, why not just launch a global or regional system of Ka-band or HTS Ku-band internet satellites? Essentially, cost and predictability of demand on national and regional levels.

Achieving impressive speeds, this is the new gold standard.

Notably, ViaSat itself has yet to announce a launch date for its ViaSat-3 satellite, the one that will cover the Australia and Asia Pacific regions, though it expects to have that date later this year.

Inmarsat’s GlobalXpress worldwide Ka-band now has all three initial satellites in orbit and is undergoing testing for rollout later this year. The company is also working with Deutsche Telekom to create a hybrid S-band air-to-ground system for the substantially more populated European continent.

Which brings us to the Australian context for satellite connectivity.

Internet policy positioning leads to unpredictability, not investment confidence

Building satellites is expensive and time-consuming. Launching satellites into space is expensive, is slot-limited, and also carries a risk of launch failure to take satellite providers back to the drawing board. The immense costs mean that the numerous levels of publicly traded companies involved require a significant amount of predictability that they will in fact be able to construct, sell and eventually maximise the use of their satellite capacity. Service providers must then contract to offer the services to their customers. Aviation is just one demand. Home internet is another. Satellite TV is a third. Military and other uses are also important.

Australia’s lamentable national internet policy has resulted in precisely the opposite of predictability. Frequent and drastic changes of government, policy u-turns, the use of the NBN as a political football, and the general feeling that generational decisions about the modern Australian internet are being made by people who still print out their emails, have contributed to the problem, and will continue to do so.

In this context, with frequently changing near and medium-term demands for satellite connectivity, no coherent long-term plan to provide effective internet on the ground, and with no long-term guarantees, it is difficult for satellite operators and connectivity providers to make predictions about future supply and demand – predictions which are necessary in order to build, launch and provision satellites.

An additional consideration in the Australian context is the generally slow home and office internet speeds, which engender a different set of connectivity expectations to, say, a user in Japan, Hong Kong or Scandinavia.

“This service will give Qantas customers download speeds in the air similar to what they’re used to on the ground,” Qantas CEO Alan Joyce promised when announcing the service.

Without being glib, it is much easier for an airline and its connectivity provider to promise “speeds like at home” when those speeds are at the bottom end of the scale in comparison with other countries. Lower uptake of high-demand internet sites or apps, and the slow spread of the domestic versions of internationally popular services like Netflix, mean there is correspondingly less demand for inflight internet.

Real questions exist about whether supply can meet demand

Uncertainty about whether Sky Muster’s 135 Gbps of supply can meet demand is another concern. In the US, ViaSat operates a satellite internet service similar to what NBN retail service providers will offer to Australians. The company initially expected that demand would be higher from areas outside population centres, which it assumed would be using ground connections – initially outdated copper systems like ADSL, then updated copper options like VDSL, stop-gaps like cable, and eventually fibre to the premises. However, demand essentially followed population patterns, particularly in the rapidly developing exurban areas, where installation of ground connectivity was neither competently required under universal service obligations, well regulated by the federal government, nor well coordinated on any other scale.

This pattern can be expected in Australia too, but on a wider scale given the paucity of connectivity options suitable for modern internet use even in urban and suburban areas, let alone the growing exurbs at the edges of existing cities. Demand for the interim NBN solution using contracted Ku-band satellites outstripped supply at quite literally astronomic levels. With just 135 Gbps of capacity available on the Sky Muster satellite, the same can be expected to occur, and NBN is already making plans to set limitations in place on service providers and users.

In the US, moreover, ViaSat’s inflight satellite capacity is provided alongside ground services it sells to home and business customers. If the company sees that there are spot or wide beam areas where congestion is affecting its airline customers, it can reduce the numbers of ground customers in those areas via regular churn. This option will not be available to ViaSat in Australia because it is not the satellite operator, and the company has not answered questions about whether it has ringfenced any NBN Sky Muster capacity in what was, originally, a high-stakes political provision for rural and remote Australian home and business internet.

Meanwhile, the 25 Gbps standard that is the political objective for connectivity may sound like a blissful pipe dream for many Australian homes and offices today, but it is already clear from countries where that kind of connectivity is the norm that demand increasingly outstrips even that supply. It is no longer unusual for a family of four to spend an average weekday evening where two or three high-definition internet or streaming TV shows are being watched, one or two family members may be videochatting with friends, another may be doing data-intensive work, and another may be playing a high-bandwidth, low-latency ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing’ videogame.

During the day, the rise of the gig economy, increasing telecommuting, widespread remote working, digital work, videoconferencing, the modern web, application auto-updates, and skyrocketing social media use are all increasing, not decreasing, the demands put on connections.

Jetstar passengers might also see Wi-Fi connectivity, but at a price.

In the event that Sky Muster is indeed oversubscribed, it may well end up being an interim solution for ViaSat until its ViaSat-3 system launches. The company hopes to announce a launch date – a matter of years into the future, likely – for this final satellite in its own global constellation this year. Clearly, there will be advantages to ViaSat to operating its own satellites. The counterargument, of course, is that with a dedicated communications satellite above Australia, it makes a lot of sense to dedicate Australian inflight connectivity for the domestic fleet to that satellite.

Australians can expect to experience high-latency, high-speed inflight Internet

Putting the Australian supply/demand context aside, the passenger experience on Qantas can be expected to be broadly similar to that offered by jetBlue in the United States. Broadly, this is a positive service in the US context, and with the lower standards for what a “good” connection is in Australia, most users will be pleasantly surprised – particularly those who have used other sorts of inflight internet connections.

Upsides to the Qantas-ViaSat-NBN solution include the speed. Alan Joyce wouldn’t be drawn into discussing speed at the press conference launching the product, even though ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg promised “reaching speeds up to 20 Mbps per person and enough total bandwidth to support virtually any activity including streaming live or on-demand video and music”. This would be a similar experience to jetBlue.

ViaSat’s Buchman confirms to Australian Aviation, “Today, on jetBlue, and those Virgin America and United flights equipped with ViaSat’s technology, passengers have seen speeds up to 20 Mbps to each device. ViaSat offers a 12 Mbps service level agreement as part of its airline commitments. ” The downsides are, primarily, latency, as measured in speed testing by the term “ping” and often referred to as “lag”. It’s the time between your device making a request over the connection (show me a webpage, fire the trigger on this videogame weapon, load this image, send this email) and the remote server starting to fulfil it. (Actually fulfilling it is relatively fast; the latency comes in the request being delivered. ) In real terms, it can feel a little like a time delay of around a second, along the lines of old satellite telephone calls where there was a significant lag between both sides – for much the same 36,000km geosynchronous orbit reasons.

As a result of the distances involved, the roundtrip response time (at its absolute minimum) is around half a second, which is how long the radio waves at the speed of light, approximately 300,000km per second, take to travel from aircraft-satellite-groundstation-satellite-aircraft, at 0. 12 seconds per segment. The response time from the ground station to the rest of the internet (to start loading a webpage, start sending an email, and so on) is on top of that.

ViaSat does a lot of work behind the scenes to minimise latency, and Buchman insists “It’s not about latency – it’s about capacity. When you have a lot of capacity like ViaSat does, latency is not an issue for high-speed web browsing or video, movie or music streaming services. Today we’ve seen as many as 148 simultaneous active devices on any given flight and with many of those devices using streaming media. ” Streaming video will, broadly, be possible. Optimisation by video streaming providers like Amazon Video (which has a partnership with jetBlue over the ViaSat connection) and Netflix (which has a partnership with Virgin America on those few aircraft where that carrier offers the same ViaSat connection) is now well-established technology.

There may well be congestion issues in particular spot beams, which may cause problems for inflight connectivity. If we assume that the exurban satellite internet demand is at least as strong in Australia as in the US, it’s reasonable to assume that the four NBN spot beams between Sydney and Melbourne or Sydney and Brisbane will be particularly in demand – creating a bottleneck in these areas in particular. To an extent, it doesn’t matter if the spot beam over Longreach is barely used if the spot beam over Wagga Wagga is full up, and the political reality of NBN receiving angry letters from politicians if spot beams are moved is an additional complication.

The future of Australian internet will be decided after the initial Qantas rollout

Qantas and ViaSat intend to start trialling a Boeing 737-800 with Ka-band connectivity later this year. A rollout to the fleet currently planned to receive satellite antennas is currently planned to start in early 2017. “Qantas is also examining options for high-speed Wi-Fi across its international and regional fleet,” the airline said.

The question, of course, is what options there are for the remainder of the fleet. There’s the domestic side of things, with QantasLink’s turboprops unlikely to be cost/benefit analysis positive for installation. The Boeing 717 fleet is a possibility, however, with the fuselage diameter of that aircraft larger even than the Embraer E190 aircraft that ViaSat is currently provisioning for jetBlue.

The international fleet – the A330-300, the Airbus A380, the increasingly toothy yet much beloved Boeing 747-400, and the future Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner – is another question entirely. If ViaSat can deliver a reasonable service on existing Ku-band provision into Asia, that’s a point in its favour, particularly once the faster HTS satellites come into play over the remainder of this decade. And once ViaSat-3 is launched, enabling global Ka-band coverage, that option will also come into play. Inmarsat’s GlobalXpress worldwide Ka-band is also an option, as is HTS Ku-band from other operators like Panasonic and Global Eagle.

Qantas and Virgin Australia have copped flak for not taking the inflight internet plunge sooner. But as the example from jetBlue – itself a late adopter – shows, late mover advantage can be a boon to the passenger experience.

Late mover advantage can be a boon to the passenger experience.