The second of our Yocova ab initio series is a first-read for where aviation stands on key topics and technical specialties. Today, we’re diving into inflight internet connectivity.
From the perspective of where we stand in the middle of 2021, there are two major pieces of the connectivity puzzle: providing faster and increasingly free passenger internet throughout the cabin, and integrating connectivity as part of the global aircraft operations digitalisation agenda.
To triangulate the industry position, we spoke with three senior executives from some of the world’s largest inflight connectivity providers: alphabetically, Don Buchman, Viasat’s vice president and general manager for commercial aviation, Paul Kent, director for connectivity products at Panasonic Avionics, and Niels Steenstrup, senior vice president of the inflight connectivity business at Inmarsat.
On the passenger side, Kent says, demand has never been higher. “Usage per flight and per passenger demand is increasing at a faster rate now than before the pandemic.”
Steenstrup concurs, citing rapid growth of take rate (percentage of passengers using the system) and notes that “even the lowest of low cost carriers in North America are evaluating and getting into connectivity now”.
Yet, Buchman notes, coming over the hill is the prospect that inflight connectivity will become a hygiene factor in the air, not least as a generation of passengers — at least in some parts of the world — have never known a time without inflight connectivity. “I have an internet connection to the office or home, wherever I may be,” he says. “You don’t think of it as this precious resource — you think of it as just another tool in your tool chest that you take advantage of, along with everything else.”
COVID has focussed minds on maximising the operations benefits of connectivity
“The pandemic has forced airlines to take a hard look at their digital capabilities, and how they can innovate and provide solutions that help them provide an edge over over competitors,” Steenstrup explains. “There are clear outlier airlines here, who are taking these capabilities and using them to differentiate themselves.”
Airlines like Delta in the US, Qatar Airways in the Middle East and the IAG carriers — British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Level and Vueling — in Europe are ahead of the curve here, and are realising early benefits.
“Several airlines have enabled pilot-specific SSIDs and applications for planning, operating, recording and monitoring — before, during and post-flight,” says Panasonic’s Kent. “Those same airlines have also enabled cabin technologies such as POS [point-of-sale] device activation, payment, and several others to support a more efficient and accurate operation in the cabin.”
Real-time IoT data processing around maintenance and repair requirements is particularly attractive for operations: if an aircraft can automatically transmit that it requires repair, technicians can be pulling parts and readying tools to reduce any delays on the ground to a minimum.
When talking about benefits, Viasat’s Buchman says that “hitting the pocketbook is probably number one… whether it be top line or bottom line. Fuel is still going to be dominating the airline industry’s cost structure along with labour. That’s where you see a lot of things in the works: trying to have better route planning, better fuel optimisation of the aircraft.”
“There have been a lot of non-real-time applications of this,” he notes, expecting benefits of live, updated and two-way data connections to accelerate the trend.
Inflight entertainment — the other primary part of the Panasonic Avionics portfolio within aviation — is also seeing a substantial set of early benefits.
“There are also other services which have enabled bi-directional background data on- and off-load over the connectivity pipe for faster software staging, content loading and media refresh, which have optimised update windows and lessened touch time while the aircraft is on the ground,” Kent explains.
The challenges of inflight connectivity are balanced with the opportunities
Even in this context of a ripe field of benefits waiting to be harvested from the air, there are still barriers to selection, adoption, implementation and benefit realisation of inflight connectivity.
“The challenges for new airlines — or for airlines that already have connectivity that are thinking about expanding into new fleets,” says Inmarsat’s Steenstrup, are around “demonstrating the business case and the return on investment for inflight connectivity in a economically challenging environment.”
One critical part of the business case is the friction between systems designed often decades apart. Aviation is not yet at a point where connectivity systems are entirely hardware or software agnostic, with inflight internet service providers in some cases also competing against other companies to offer IoT-enabled software and systems.
At the same time, while the API and SDK ecosystems are continually improving, they lag terrestrial infrastructure, as a result of a variety of interlinked factors: systems onboard aircraft are largely legacy verging in many ways on anachronistic, most notably because certification requirements are onerous and updates are expensive.
A further challenge is around the timing of the inevitable “free” inflight internet.
“We’re going to see airlines providing at least some level of service for free to passengers,” says Steenstrup. “It comes in many different shapes and sizes. It can be ‘we’re going to provide messaging for free to everybody’: it’s lower bandwidth, it’s lower cost. It could be ‘we are going to provide all our Concierge Key or A-List Preferred passengers free service’. It can be everybody in the front of the plane gets free service, or it could be everybody in the entire aircraft gets free service.”
Panasonic’s Kent concurs, saying that “we are underway with several streaming and free-of-charge trials with the airlines. We see airlines moving towards a higher speed of network because the passengers are demanding it and many airlines are already talking about how soon they will be moving to a free-of-charge model.”
This brings a concomitant opportunity to market to an ultra-valuable passenger segment, within what is already a profitable advertising demographic.
Steenstrup explains that “airline passengers, irrespective of where they are in the world, it doesn’t matter — it could be the poorest country or richest country in the world — are an attractive demographic for advertisers and sponsors to reach, just by being on a plane.”
Connectivity providers are certainly investing heavily to meet both the passenger-side and airline-side demand, and the technology pipeline is certainly full.
Buchman cites the three forthcoming Viasat-3 satellites, while Steenstrup highlights that Inmarsat’s GX constellation continues to grow.
Kent points to new low-orbit satellites enhancing the existing geostationary earth orbit networks, while noting that “we are targeting new tools and techniques to manage this capability and are also looking forward to the newest satellite technology and antenna technology which is fairly ‘juicy’ and just around the corner.”
Author: John Walton
Published: 13th July 2021
;
