Delivering Broadband To The Aircraft - Page 3 of 3

Range of Services

Air time and service providers are taking full advantage of improved infrastructure and projected equipment capabilities to deliver broadband services. A major driver of the demand is the wish of aircraft occupants to use their own mobile phones, laptops and other portable electronic devices while airborne.
Gulfstream is Arinc’s launch customer for SKYLink Mobile Broadband. Connected users can download data from the Internet at some 3 megabits per second (Mbps) or transmit data at 128 kbps. A derivative system developed for commercial aircraft can deliver data to the aircraft at speeds up to 5 Mbps to the aircraft and from the aircraft at 256 kbps. Both systems utilize transponders on SES Americom satellites to provide service over North America. SES Americom, in partnership with Arinc, is extending coverage to much of Europe and the Middle East, with coverage of North Atlantic due to follow. Latin America and Asia also are in the partners’ sights.
L-band service is offered by OnAir, a joint venture between Airbus and Sita Inc. that aims to satisfy the connectivity and personal telephone needs of airline passengers rather than just business jet users. OnAir estimates that more than 700 million passengers annually could be interested in onboard GSM service by 2009. Based on SwiftBroadband, the service offers shared data rates of up to 864 kbps and will support GSM phone use. It will be available for both Boeing and Airbus aircraft beginning in 2007. EMS Satcom will supply its AMT-3500 intermediate-gain antenna for Airbus, while Thales Avionics will provide its TopFlight SwiftBroadband terminal to support the air-to-ground link.
Passenger mobile phones will communicate safely with ground networks via a miniature onboard picocell base station, which will keep the power emitted by individual cell phones within flight-safe limits. System features enable the cabin crew to control the level of service. For instance, during designated quiet periods, they can switch to data-only operation to avoid nuisances to other passengers. “OnAir is creating a whole new market,” says Inmarsat CEO Andrew Sukawaty. “Inmarsat’s aeronautical services originally targeted long-haul, twin-aisle aircraft, with low bandwidth limiting the offer. Now the development of lightweight, compact avionics is bringing broadband to the single-aisle, short-haul market.”
OnAir CEO George Cooper expects the Western European single-aisle, short-haul sector to provide the greatest demand for voice, with data services appealing more to long haul. The company also plans to extend OnAir service to other regions, including the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
Air France, British airline BMI and Portugal’s TAP plan to undertake commercial trials of the OnAir service. Meanwhile, the Airbus/Sita joint venture has concluded an agreement with Ryanair under which the low-cost carrier will introduce the service on its entire fleet of more than 200 Boeing 737s. Agreements with several other airlines are said to be close. OnAir is confident that the telecom regulatory environment needed to support its onboard cell phone offering will be in place in good time for service launch. OnAir has been working hard with the pan-European telecoms regulatory body, the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations, to develop a framework that will minimize the number of separate national approvals needed before a carrier can offer the new service to passengers. Pricing is expected to be in line with roaming charges for international cell phone calls, starting at $2.30 to $2.50 a minute but falling to $1.50 per minute over five years as conventional mobile communication prices fall.
OnAir faces competition from rival provider AeroMobile, a joint venture between Arinc and Telenor. This partnership’s claim is that it safely connects the global GSM network to the airline industry at a price point similar to current GSM mobile phone roaming charges. AeroMobile will provide GSM voice and short messaging plus GPRS data on both narrowbody and widebody aircraft. Swift64 will be the satellite communications platform used initially, with a transition to SwiftBroadband following later. Having obtained seven national telecom authority licences and 45 roaming agreements with cellular operators around the globe, AeroMobile expects to become operational in 2007, says David Coily, marketing and strategic relationships director. Qantas plans to evaluate the service, testing it on a Boeing 767 on Australian domestic routes over a three-month period in mid-2007.
One market that satellite communications service providers will have their eye on is MagnaStar replacement. Existing MagnaStar phones on thousands of aircraft operating in North America which will go dead at the end of this year now that Verizon Airfone has decided to close or sell its communications service for general and corporate aviation. This follows Verizon’s failure to win spectrum allocation in a 2006 U.S. government auction. Airfone is a mixed terrestrial-satellite system, the satellite communications portion being based on Inmarsat Aero H, Aero H+ and Aero I systems. Florida-based Satcom Direct has seized the opportunity to offer a substitute. Under its PlaneSimple calling plan, subscribers will be able to make global voice calls at $5.50 per minute, plus a monthly service charge of $20. Satcom Direct exploits the Inmarsat infrastructure and the affordable low-earth orbit-based service from Iridium LLC.
Another contender for this market is AirCell Inc., with its AirCell Axxess EZ satellite communications. Supporting voice and narrowband data in its basic form, this system is designed to reuse existing MagnaStar aircraft wiring and component locations and gives operators the option of retaining key legacy system features such as call alerting and integrated fax capability. According to Jack Blumenstein, AirCell president & CEO, Axxess EZ also gives operators a rapid path to AirCell’s new air-to-ground broadband service that will debut in late 2007. The system will work with EMS Satcom’s eNfusion HSD-128 and HSD-400 terminals, offering two and four channels, respectively, of Swift service. Initially, these would be Swift64, but could be upgraded to SwiftBroadband.
Honeywell, which is concentrating on the corporate jet market, has been flight testing GSM technology on one of its corporate jets. Honeywell feels it has solved interference problems and that the corporate market will lead the way for approval of in-flight cell phones. “The solution for bizjets will move ahead, but the airline market will take a little longer to shake out,” says Eric Olson, Honeywell’s product marketing manager for cabin systems. Olson feels some of the issues with cell phone use are ethical, not technical. The possibility of annoying other passengers on long-haul flights is a key factor for airlines. “Our product, although it will apply to the airline market, is targeted at the bizjet market where we don’t have to worry about that.”
Honeywell’s system is an add-on to the communications already installed on the aircraft and makes use of an onboard wireless base station called a picocell, a small antenna that sets up a cell spot on the plane. The picocell keeps phones from interfering with aircraft systems or the ground cellular network by directing each phone to adjust to its lowest possible power level, says Honeywell. “So when you are flying on an airplane, the cellular network thinks of you as roaming someplace,” Olson says. “When I call you, I don’t need to know what airplane you are on. I can call your cell phone number directly and it will ring your phone.”
While the cell phone system will work with any air-to-ground communications system on the plane, the difference is in the number of simultaneous calls that can be made and the price of the calls, Olson says. The low-cost Iridium system allows one call per channel. The higher-bandwidth systems, like Swift64, put more simultaneous calls on the same link. With high-speed data the system allows seven simultaneous cell phone calls.
For fractional operators who do not want to pay for people to use the system, the entire cost of the call will show up on the individual’s cell phone bill. “For some companies, the [corporate] flight department pays for all communications costs on the aircraft. For other flight departments that don’t pay that cost, it can go directly to the user,” Olson says. On top of the Iridium or other satellite communications cost, there will be a typical cell phone roaming rider. With a personal digital assistant or short text message, the charge for each message is worked out by the service provider, he says.

The Future

Broadband satellite communications will enable airlines to differentiate themselves on the basis of the in-flight experience by offering a growing variety of data-rich services. Business jet occupants will benefit from an extension into the air of the same Internet/intranet/entertainment environments they are used to on the ground. Current indications are that all passengers will be able to enjoy the use of their own cell phones and other devices during flight.
The benefits of rapid data communication will spill over from the cabin to the flight deck and to offices on the ground, enhancing operational efficiency and flight security. Narrowband will still, however, have a place and the players we have mentioned will face competition from increasingly sophisticated but lower-cost services based on low orbiting platforms such as Iridium, Thuraya, Globalstar and Orbcomm. In particular, these will offer affordable regional solutions. Overall, hopes are high that satellite communications will be a key enabler in bringing commercial aviation into the data-centric 21st century. Recent progress suggests that this mode of communication will be well up to the task.