A week before the doors opened on the buzzing inflight connectivity halls that take up the north side of the Aircraft Interiors Expo, satellite Internet provider Viasat’s acquisition of one of its primary competitors, Inmarsat, completed. For the very latest on this groundbreaking shakeup of the connectivity landscape, we sat down with Viasat’s Don Buchman, vice president and general manager for commercial aviation, and Niels Steenstrup, president, aviation at Inmarsat, newly acquired and now known as ‘Viasat London’.
The new Viasat is a commercial aviation Internet heavyweight: 19 satellites in space are presently serving over 3,100 aircraft from more than 60 airlines, with a further 2,000-plus aircraft within the installation backlog or under contract for installation. A further nearly 1,700 business jets are equipped with Ka-band services — widely considered the gold standard within global inflight connectivity at present — from the combined operator.
In any acquisition of a previous competitor this size, there is a certain presumptive benefit for the deal, based on information known to the acquiring party, but the detail of the total benefit, as well as how those benefits will be realised, is sometimes opaque or at least translucent. Given the previous competition between the companies, cooperation prior to the closure of the acquisition would have been unlawful, so the first task for the new Viasat is to take a look at the big picture.
“Our first mission together is really getting the roadmap rationalised,” Buchman tells us. “We all agree on the end state: every terminal, whether it be maritime, business aviation, commercial aviation, can access whatever the best network is in its region at that point for its mission. Now it’s the hard work: the technical side of getting there, and how fast we get there and bring our customers on a journey with us: give them a roadmap, give them transparency on what to expect.”
The message to airlines, Steenstrup says, is “do no harm, and business as usual. They’re fine, they’re okay, whatever selection they’ve made. We’re going to work with them on getting to an even better place than they originally had planned.”
As part of the integration, Viasat is taking a ‘first one hundred days’ approach, reviewing every part of the new combined business, its satellite portfolio, its onboard hardware, its ground stations — all the way down to its executive and working-level staffing. At the end, which neatly coincides with the APEX Expo in Long Beach in the northern hemisphere autumn, the company hopes to have a clearer idea of what benefits can be realised, and when.
Rationalisation of satellites and coverage: “our first mission”
Until the merger, the industry largely perceived Viasat as offering an incredibly strong Ka-band proposition in the regions where it had the full hardware and service vertical (above the US in particular), but less so where it had to partner (for example in Europe). On the Inmarsat side, Ka-band coverage was seen as global, with decent performance, but not up to Viasat’s.
Viasat’s promise of global US-style speeds with its trio of ViaSat-3 generation satellites was beginning to come to fruition before the acquisition, but its proposition is only accelerated by the ability to offer global coverage through the pre-merger Inmarsat constellation.
The first ViaSat-3 satellite has now, Buchman confirms, “made it to orbit, it’s gotten its solar arrays out, got the antennas deployed, booms out — now we’re basically entering that in orbit testing. We launched on a Falcon Heavy, which then got us to orbit within about two weeks. ViaSat-2 took six months or seven months to do the same. So now, it’s on: we and Boeing are basically doing the typical, ‘make sure nothing broke on the ride up’.”
Viasat is expecting full handover by the end of the month, with aviation implementation starting slowly later in the northern hemisphere summer, before the second ViaSat-3’s launch later this year.
To this constellation, Steenstrup says, add “another ten between the combined companies that are planned for, and we’ll be launching them in the coming years. Between the ViaSat-3 and the massive capacity that brings, and the GX constellation that’s already there, and the launches planned for that, you’ve got coverage everywhere, and you got massive capacity particularly where you need it.”
Hardware rationalisation may be a bit, well, harder
Inflight connectivity’s provision chain of modems, antennas, satellites and base stations has, historically, differed even between providers of similar connectivity services — like the two primary providers of Ka-band, Viasat and Inmarsat. Beyond the satellite constellations, part of the pre-acquisition selling points echoed by Buchman and Steenstrup in previous years’ discussions was the superiority of one terminal over another, one piece of satellite hardware over another, one way of waveform design over another, and so on.
That hardware tune has, perhaps unsurprisingly, changed — but only somewhat, and dependent on the age of the hardware concerned, with recent hardware generally more likely to be cross-compatible.
“We’re looking at the portfolios,” Buchman explains. “Right now, just out of the box, neither side is compatible from a waveform perspective, or frequency, or all those sorts of things. Some of our terminals are more compatible: some of the older generations that we both have aren’t as compatible with the next generation.”
Buchman suggests that what Viasat thinks of as first-generation terminals, primarily those older installations that have not yet been upgraded on JetBlue and United, are likely to be less compatible, and that their upgrade will become more compelling with the new networks.
Steenstrup concurs: “Ka is definitely very, very strong for aviation. But like on any network, you’re going to have different flavours of the implementation, so to ensure compatibility and so on, there’s work to do.”
This is likely to be a one-time current problem, and indeed with the growth of models like Airbus’ HBCplus — essentially, a supplier-furnished linefit common terminal, in this case a mechanically steered phased array manufactured by ThinKom and provided by Safran Passenger Innovations, which can use multiple networks — these hardware differences are likely to reduce overall within the industry.
Overall, though, the elephant in the room (or, indeed, in geosynchronous orbit) is that competition authorities in the US, UK and EU approved the acquisition of two satellite competitors that even five years ago would have been of a seismic scale, comparable to a structural change in the industry akin to a notional acquisition of IAG by Air France-KLM. The growth of other providers — notably the medium and low earth orbit constellations, of which Starlink and SES’ O3b are perhaps the best known — and the prospects for these networks to serve commercial aviation cannot be overstated.
Author: John Walton
Published 20 June 2023
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