The Connectivity Challenge

Three principal providers, ViaSat, Inmarsat and Thales, offer Ka-band connectivity. ViaSat’s is based both on its own satellites over the US and contracted capacity elsewhere, including for its Qantas contract, and is best known for the widely praised connectivity on its customer jetBlue. Inmarsat operates its own network, but while it has won numerous orders it has yet to demonstrate the capacity to technology or aviation media for independent assessment.

Thales, formerly a partner of ViaSat, is re-entering the market with satellite provider SES.

Ku-band connectivity is also offered by three principal providers: Panasonic Avionics, Gogo and Global Eagle Entertainment (GEE). ViaSat also offers Ku-band connectivity, but it’s not the company’s main focus.

Panasonic Avionics is currently the market leader into Australia, with roughly a dozen airlines offering its Ku-band system currently delivering “around 50 gigabytes per day today,” vice president for global communications services David Bruner tells Australian Aviation, with “a lot of new airlines that are coming on in the next year that would probably double the number of airlines and more than double the amount of traffic.”

Qantas is working with ViaSat on a Ka-band system using the NBN Sky Muster satellites for the domestic Boeing 737-800 fleet, plus Ku-band connectivity for its Airbus A330‑200s. Air New Zealand has selected Inmarsat’s Global Express (GX) for its jet fleet, while Virgin Australia has yet to announce which provider it has selected.

Australia and New Zealand present unique demand issues for connectivity

“Asia Pacific, and in this case specifically Oceania, has not been one of the earlier adopters in terms of the global roll-out of wi-fi onboard,” summarises Inmarsat’s Bill Peltola, senior director for aviation in Asia Pacific.

“That’s not too surprising when you consider their location and competitive landscape. A lot of the major airlines in the world have yet to make major fleet decisions, and there have also been some other technical challenges that I think have caused some airlines to defer their decisions. Air New Zealand in the beginning of October – when they announced having selected GX – made the comment that they didn’t, until now, really think that there was a technology that could serve their unique vast network and route structure.”

“One of the challenges for the market is that there is a sparse population,” says ViaSat VP and general manager for commercial mobility Don Buchman. “You’ve got strong population densities on the east coast, but is there enough demand to put a lot of capacity over that? There’s a lot of ocean [around] Australia and New Zealand, especially to the east and the north.”

For “a lot of the providers using Ku band,” notes Inmarsat’s Peltola, “those satellites were not put up there to serve the oceans, they were put up there to serve populated areas, primarily.

They’ve done a pretty decent job stitching together a network around most parts of the world. Inmarsat’s perspective is quite different: we don’t focus on population centres at all, we focus on mobile clients that are going everywhere all of the time, especially the oceans in terms of our maritime legacy as well as our aviation [business], which is growing at an immense rate.”

By building supply with the National Broadband Network, though, ViaSat’s Buchman says, Commonwealth authorities have made a smart move – and one that ViaSat is using to supply Qantas. “One of the great things that the Australian Government did with the NBN is really try to bring true broadband to all its citizens. Real broadband that was designed and built to achieve consumer economics has been put into place and now we’ve been lucky enough to partner with NBN to bring that to the flying public.”

Australians want to use internet inflight as much as anyone else. “It’s the same market desires: people want to use the internet like they do on the ground, whether in motion or at home,” Buchman says. “What the data tells us is whether they’re on a train ride into the city or on a morning flight from Sydney to Melbourne, they’re going to want to be connected. Each passenger is obviously different: you have your business applications and connectivity products like social media, texting, email, information services and catchup data.”

Relatively slow rollouts offer time for tweaking, but may frustrate passengers

Qantas and ViaSat’s trial Boeing 737-800 aircraft will go live “early next year,” Buchman promises. “We’re basically getting everything ready to go, all the ground systems checked out, all the normal things you go through to get a system ready for this as you bring it on. Qantas will be running the trial, and we’ll be supporting Qantas.

“It’s not a market feedback kind of thing, it’s to get the technology in there and get it running, to get the kit going, to get all the technical people comfortable with how it works, to get the bugs worked out on the new network, and to make it real.”

People want to use the internet like they do on the ground. VIASAT’S DON BUCHMAN

Underlining the lead times that are needed in this part of the industry, Buchman notes that “when we made the announcement with Qantas, the satellite was in in-orbit testing and hadn’t even launched on residential. You have the other regulatory things like getting hardware designed, approved, kitted and put on the airplane, and that was a month or two back. That was the normal course of starting fresh on the airplane, doing the surveys and getting it on. In this case it’s just around getting the infrastructure in place for the brand new system.”

Once installed, tested and rolled out, Buchman is promising Qantas passengers an experience with “really no difference” compared with what jetBlue flyers in the US enjoy. “We’re implementing our same antenna and wireless access points: it’s the next generation of equipment, but from the kit standpoint it’s the antenna, the modem, the wi-fi access points, the server, the radome. The expectation from that is essentially invisible to the passenger, and very much equivalent to what’s flying today.”

The kit is “more capable,” Buchman notes, highlighting that the onboard technology has been future-proofed.

“It’s forward-compatible for our ViaSat-2 and -3 technologies from the kit standpoint. It’s more powerful: the modem speeds go up as high as a gigabit per second, the processors are faster, the wireless access points have the latest generation of 802.11ac – it’s all the latest electronics you’d find across the board when updating your office or home.”

Connectivity providers disagree about owning vs renting satellite capacity

“I’ve been involved in the connectivity industry as long as it’s been around, with companies working with air to ground, with Ku-band, and with Ka-band,” Inmarsat’s Bill Peltola says.

“The design and planning for the GX network is just so much better in terms of the architecture to provide services to mobile clients. It eliminates a lot of the challenges that you have if you are buying satellite capacity from somebody else, particularly Ku-band. I know from experience that just trying to find capacity on Ku-band satellites is a big challenge. Every time a transponder or part of a transponder becomes available – or people hear that it’s going to be available – everybody is scurrying around, and you have these arbitrage agents trying to suck up this capacity and resell it quick because it’s so scarce.”

Ku-band operator Panasonic Avionics’ David Bruner disagrees, perhaps unsurprisingly. “We have a lot more flexibility… more sources to choose from, more new satellites being launched that we can buy capacity on. It gave us more flexibility, a larger marketplace. We take this layered network approach. Where we have a satellite here and we can add another one even that covers the

Air New Zealand goes global with Inmarsat

With its recent selection of Inmarsat’s Global Express Kaband connectivity product for its jet fleet, Air New Zealand is, like other airlines in the region, a late mover on Inflight Internet, but expects the speed and coverage that Inmarsat can offer on new satellites to make up for the delay. “Inmarsat’s new GX Satellite network provides the capability to offer a global, high speed and consistent service across our Pacific Rim network, which previously presented challenges around coverage and service inconsistencies,” the airline tells Australian Aviation. “Air New Zealand operates some of the longest flights in the world, in oceanic zones where there’s historically been poor quality satellite services. The airline has worked closely with its connectivity partners to overcome these challenges and is confident it will deliver a high quality customer experience.”

“Like most travellers, our customers expect the freedom and choice to connect when they want. Our business travellers are particularly interested in maximising productivity while all customers want seamless access to messaging and social apps — regardless of the length or type of flight.”

Notably, Air New Zealand is not talking about inflight streaming of movies via services like Netflix. “Customers will be able to stay connected while travelling with access to email, messaging, social and web browsing. We’ll be looking to trial different access propositions to enable the best possible experience.”

“Proving flights are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2017, with services anticipated to rollout on international jet services in late 2017,” the airline says.

Not all the fleet will be outfitted, however. “The roll out will commence on our Tasman jet fleet in late 2017, with services progressively added on our Pacific and long-haul aircraft. Domestic jet services are expected to be added in 2018. We’re continuing to actively explore options for our regional turboprop fleets that would provide a level of service consistent with what we’re launching on our jet fleets.”

“We’ll be fitting four different types of jet aircraft as part of the rollout and will consider the best approach for each type,” Air New Zealand promises, noting that its forthcoming Airbus A320neo family aircraft “will be fitted by Airbus in Toulouse, and we are also investigating the role our bases in New Zealand will play.”

Despite not selecting the competing Panasonic Avionics Ku-band system, “within the cabin we’re also working with Panasonic Avionics to further innovate the connected customer experience through personal devices and our IFE,” Air New Zealand also notes.

While “we expect to release details of our customer experience, including speeds and proposition in the first half of 2017,” the airline says, “Air New Zealand is exploring multiple opportunities to leverage the benefits of a fully connected fleet. We’ve already identified the potential for improved and more cost-effective communication between our aircraft and ground-based engineering and operational teams, along with the ability to provide real-time weather updates to the flightdeck. There’s also potential for enabling cabin crew with on demand access to operational and customer information.”

same geography and then another one that covers the same geography, each with more and more capacity and capability.”

“One might be operated by SES and another one by Intelsat,” Bruner suggests, “and another one by Eutelsat, and it really doesn’t matter. We buy raw capacity and then we manage it in our network. So, it gives us a lot more flexibility and options.”

Peltola says that Inmarsat, by contrast, “starts with a clean sheet of paper from the ground up and says: what markets am I going to go after? What percentage of these markets do I think I can get? What amount of bandwidth and capacity can I use? What’s the best technology to use? How do I spread out the spot beams and basically build a network from the ground up that, from day one, has all of the capacity that you need to serve the customers?”

“There are other factors too” Peltola highlights, “like being able to own your own satellites, control and drive your own satellites, and own your own earth stations. It gives you the flexibility and the ability to be able to do things that you can’t do if you’re buying those services from somebody else.”

The tradeoff, Panasonic’s Bruner notes, is that “if you have a launch failure take place, and unfortunately, they do take place in our business, we’ve never been able to not satisfy our customer. We were able to go get capacity somewhere else to meet the needs until we could find another solution. If you have a delay in a satellite launch or you have a failure in one of the proprietary schemes, you’re out of luck for a long time.”

Yet, Peltola says, “despite the fact that aviation wi-fi is becoming very big in the satellite world, it’s still far from the biggest buyer of satellite capacity.”

New Ka-band satellites have arrived, and more are on their way

With Inmarsat’s Global Express Kaband constellation now in orbit, and the existing Ku-band network being supplemented by new satellites, ViaSat’s next generation connectivity system is the next big arrival over Australian skies.

“Our long-term roadmap is the ViaSat-3 constellation, and our third satellite [will be] over Asia Pacific,” ViaSat’s Don Buchman says. “What this does for us is to really start giving us an in-region base of business, so as we get closer to the launch of the third ViaSat-3 over Asia Pacific, we’ve built up a lot of interest and capabilities within the region to start capturing more and more of the business there, whether it be commercial airlines, maritime, general aviation, residential – across the board. For us it’s a great opportunity. First and foremost, the Qantas brand is second to none. It gives a good demonstration platform as we build momentum into our ViaSat-3 launch across the entire Asia Pacific region.”

“That’s one of the reasons we worked so closely with NBN: to ensure that we’ve got the supply for the contract,” Buchman notes. “Bringing more bandwidth in the region is a good thing, and we always have the backstop of knowing a terabit per second is coming a few years down the road.”

That terabit per second will come with the third ViaSat-3 satellite. “The first satellite’s in the middle of 2019,” Buchman says, with two more following “in six-month increments.

We’re still looking at Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, followed by Asia Pacifc. Mid-2020 would be today’s guess for the third bird, over Asia Pacific.”

Will ViaSat complete its rollout to the Qantas aircraft currently planned before the arrival of its own satellite over the region? “We’d expect to, based on what Qantas has indicated,” Buchman says. “They would like our contracted fleet installed by 2018.

That’s feasible with their fleet and how they rotate aircraft. For our contracted portion of the fleet, we expect to have our high-speed wi-fi service operating on aircraft ahead of the third ViaSat-3 launch, in the Asia Pacific region.”

Ku-band upgrades will increase speed and coverage of existing connectivity

Passengers on airlines with Ku-band systems can also look forward to a better experience with new HTS, VHTS and XTS satellites, explains Panasonic’s David Bruner. “HTS is a fairly common industry term for much higher throughput and it typically meant that you would have multiple spot beams with frequency reuse. Each one of those spot beams would be somewhere in the 140 to 200 megahertz per spot beam.”

“We started a few years ago on designing a next generation that would have two or three times the amount of megahertz per spot beam. We coined the term extreme throughput satellite (XTS). Some other industry service operators were also going down this path, and they call that VHTS or very high throughput satellites,” Bruner notes. “We have some other unique bits that we put into our satellites that are unique to Panasonic and our requirements.”

“An example is SES-15, which goes into service next year. It’s going to be used by us and by [Kuband competitor] Global Eagle Entertainment in the North American region,” Bruner says. “In some cases, there’s 450 megahertz to one single spot beam. That’s a lot of frequency. And so, it really gives you the capability to offer a completely different kind of service, than one that only has 120, 140, 160 megahertz per spot beam. We can service a lot more aircraft under that single spot beam a lot more efficiently. An A380 could even support 200, 300 or 400 megabits, if you needed to. We don’t need to do that right now, but we sure could envision – in the life of the satellite and the life of the aircraft – that we could be in a situation that we need to be able to support very, very high data rates. Now, we have a solution that would be able to do that.”

Satellite capacity overall is growing across the region

“As NBN gets takeup and rampup of their beams, they’re going to ramp up just like we did”, says ViaSat’s Buchman about terrestrial and airborne satellite internet, both of which the company provides in North America. “They’re going to get a lot of demand and I think their customers are going to be very happy with their service. Our expectation is that they’re going to have two satellites they’re going to be filling up, and I think NBN will fulfil us as long as we need, but if there comes a point that NBN can’t supply any more in the future, we’ve taken steps to make sure we have the capacity.”

Buchman is confident that ViaSat can serve what Qantas wants to its customers. “We know what Qantas is looking for, and what is available to buy with NBN. We have really no worries on the supply side.”

Peltola, too, says that while he and his Inmarsat colleagues are working with the air-to-ground European Aviation Network in the densely populated European continent, they “don’t really see any gaps in our ability to provide service to the number of customers that we believe we can get. That raises another point, in terms of controlling the satellites: we’ve got a lot of flexibility in terms of what we can do to focus the energy of those satellites. We’ve got the global spot beams which we can double up if we need capacity, but we’ve also got steerable beams. If we acquire a customer that needs capacity in a certain region, we can dynamically allocate that capacity – and we do that as part of our planning with certain large customers. We do have the ability to focus satellite energy in certain regions, so it gives us the flexibility to provide a good service to all of our customers.”

Airlines are making different real-world inflight internet experience promises

“This service will give Qantas customers download speeds in the air similar to what they’re used to on the ground,” chief executive Alan Joyce said when launching his airline’s partnership with ViaSat.

“You won’t be limited to checking your email or Facebook – it’s going to be about watching the football live, streaming your favourite TV show or movie, catching up on the latest YouTube videos, or shopping online. This kind of inflight connectivity would also open up a lot of potential to improve inflight entertainment, which we’re constantly looking to enhance.”

Neither Air New Zealand (an Inmarsat GX customer) nor Virgin Australia (which has not revealed its connectivity partner) mentioned streaming when revealing their services.

“As well as providing access to email and social media, inflight wi-fi will improve the travel experience by providing guests with up-todate information about connecting flights and their travel plans,” said Virgin Australia chief executive John Borghetti in July. “We believe our inflight wi-fi service will be popular with business travellers but also have widespread appeal for all our guests by enabling them to stay in touch and access the internet through their journey.”

Air New Zealand CEO Christopher Luxon, too, avoided any mention of streaming during his airline’s announcement. “Proving flights on a partner company test aircraft have now given us the confidence to introduce what we believe will be the world’s most reliable inflight connectivity.

Customers will be able to use their social media channels, stay on top of emails and browse the internet. Our new system will also allow us to enhance real time features within our state-of-the-art inflight entertainment system as well as providing our flightcrew with an enhanced ability to manage customer requests related to their ground travel.”

In terms of examining whether the providers are able to live up to their promises, Inmarsat sits at a disadvantage since it hasn’t conducted any test flights with technology and aviation media on board. ViaSat’s three-year-old jetBlue implementation was launched with an A320 filled with journalists and bloggers wielding a half-dozen devices each, and the service operated as advertised. The Ku-band providers, meanwhile, have clearly demonstrated that they can offer a functional product to, from and within Australia, though it does not currently support streaming.

Passengers “really should expect seamless,” says ViaSat’s Buchman. “They should walk in, and their mind shouldn’t really change from ‘I’m in the terminal and I’m interacting with my device the way I do on LTE or wi-fi’ and when they get on the plane. There shouldn’t be an ‘I have to change,’ or ‘I have to do something different’.

They should get in their seat, pull their device out, and not even realise they’re on a plane when they’re interacting and doing all the things they do with their device. That’s really the seamlessness that passengers should expect to see, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve.”

In just a few months, passengers will get to see for themselves just how seamless the service really is.

A terabit per second is coming a few years down the road.