Intelsat believes its Ku-band multi-orbit inflight connectivity solution will prove to be a far better mousetrap for airlines than any LEO-only IFC offering, whether the latter transmits via SpaceX’s Starlink, OneWeb, or the forthcoming Kuiper and Telesat Lightspeed constellations. The satellite operator and aero ISP’s multi-orbit offering is supported by OneWeb LEO service and Intelsat’s own GEO satellite network.

Only one provider — SpaceX — is currently powering LEO-only IFC for airlines. Hughes Network Systems, meanwhile, is offering OneWeb LEO-only IFC in commercial aviation as part of a cadre of new solutions including hybrid LEO/GEO. Hughes expects to flight-test its commercial electronically steered antenna in H1 2025 “with production shortly thereafter for the global Hughes In-Flight connectivity service to commercial airlines worldwide”, Hughes vice president Reza Rasoulian tells Runway Girl Network.

During a media briefing in advance of this week’s APEX TECH conference in Los Angeles — where multi-orbit IFC will be discussed at length by industry heavy-hitters including OneWeb, Telesat, Viasat, Intelsat and antenna-maker ThinKom Solutions — Intelsat head of commercial aviation Dave Bijur talked about the complementary nature of LEO + GEO. He noted that LEO constellations “are great” because they do low latency, which is “a very, very valuable thing”. LEO especially shines when supporting the likes of Teams meetings, plus collaborative office and cloud applications.

“The trouble is [LEO] spreads capacity very equally across the planet, perfectly equally in fact. The problem is that demand on the planet is not equal. You don’t have the same amount of demand in New York City that you do in the south Indian Ocean where there’s nothing; the demand profiles are different in those two places,” continued Bijur.

“In one case, you might have a couple of ships and maybe some airplanes. And the other you’ve got millions and millions of people, but the capacity is the same [with LEO]. That’s the downside of a LEO-only system. The only thing you really don’t know about it — because the capacity part of it you can analyze, you can figure that out — you don’t know the demand side of it.”

So, when you look at any of the LEO operators, SpaceX, OneWeb, Kuiper to come, Telesat, they’re all the same architecturally, which means they cannot spotlight capacity in a given location. So, when you put GEO and LEO together, you get a little bit of the best of both worlds. You get GEO which spotlights a city, spotlights a hub, spotlights anywhere there’s lot of traffic, and you’ve got LEO which does low latency.

One of the key benefits of multi-orbit LEO/GEO connectivity is its ability to support polar coverage via LEO. One of the key arguments against adoption of first-generation multi-orbit electronically steered antennas (ESAs), however, is that they are forced to use a LEO network to compensate for poor high latitude GEO performance. During APEX TECH, relevant stakeholders will be asked: will these multi-orbit ESAs face any capacity challenges when operating at and near busy high latitude hub airports?

Intelsat is armed with its own data. In December 2023, the firm engaged in a “marketing activity to help our clients understand what the future looks like” whereby it took its CRJ700 testbed aircraft to Alaska with customers onboard to showcase its multi-orbit ESA’s ability to both close GEO satellite links from Seattle to Anchorage, and then use OneWeb LEO when flying further north from Anchorage to Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow, the northernmost community in the US), located at 71° degrees Latitude north. Bijur’s fastest speed test on the OneWeb-supported flight to Utqiaġvik was 150 Mbps and “we saw latency of 100ms, somewhere in that neighborhood”.

“We didn’t notice any change in performance between Anchorage and Utqiaġvik [as the aircraft flew north]; it kind of remained the same the whole way, leading us to think that it will remain that way all the way over the top of the earth, where we did not fly on this particular mission,” said Bijur, adding that the service was consistent when the CRJ700 was on the ground or in-flight.

But is the low-latency nature of LEO plus polar coverage enough reasons for operators of GEO IFC-fitted aircraft to migrate to LEO/GEO? After all, new Viasat GX payloads-riding-on-HEO satellites are forthcoming and when ready, will support Arctic coverage for traditional GX GEO satcom clients. So Viasat, for one, will soon have a solution to the polar coverage gap.

The ability to connect polar routes is not important to the likes of Southwest Airlines, as an Intelsat spokesman noted during the firm’s media briefing. He urged us to “think about any airline that’s flying international, intercontinental routes, whether it’s Asia-Pacific, North American airlines, European airlines, etc.” Bijur added that, “It is a great new opportunity for those airlines flying polar routes, polar missions, which is a lot of them particularly between the big intercontinental hubs.”

Thus far, Intelsat has announced four customers for its multi-orbit IFC solution, three of which — Alaska Airlines, Air Canada and American Airlines — need to replace legacy Gogo air-to-ground kit on their regional jets by the end of 2025, in line with US government interests. In short, these RJs don’t quite fit that intercontinental flying profile. Even so, one can see the value in Alaska Airlines’ ability to draw on OneWeb LEO capacity for the likes of its Anchorage-Fairbanks Embraer ERJ175 service.

These early adopters of Intelsat’s multi-orbit IFC in the US and Canada are “aware that the eastern US is not getting less congested, is not getting less demand, and so they like that notion of having both” GEO and LEO, explained Bijur. The first ‘customer STC’ is expected to be completed in May for the E175 for Alaska Airlines. By the end of 2024, Intelsat hopes to have 100-150 aircraft of what it has reiterated is a 750-tail backlog.

A single-beam ESA, Intelsat’s hardware — based on partner Stellar Blu Solutions’ package with Ball Aerospace’s scalable subarrays — features software that enables it to switch between LEO and GEO satellites, something that will grow and evolve over time.

“So, what we’ve built is something that flexibly changes and will be dynamic,” said Bijur, noting that it will be less sophisticated in the beginning but in time will feature “this sort of artificial intelligence infused way of switching between the networks. At the beginning it will be a little more rudimentary. But it is coming along nicely and the hardware that it rides on is all coming through qual now for the STC.”

In Intelsat’s view, this ESA represents the ‘current state of the art’. Consistent with its participation in the Airbus supplier-furnished HBCplus program, however, Intelsat has already assessed Get SAT’s dual-beam Lesa Ku electronically steered antenna (which forms the basis of Safran’s terminal for HBCplus) and is familiar with its potential.

“It could eventually play a role on the way to a fully integrated, multi-constellation IFC future,” Intelsat confided to RGN, a paradigm that in time will include OneWeb’s Gen 2 constellation, Intelsat’s own software-defined GEO satellites, and possibly Intelsat’s own MEO constellation, though a final decision on MEO has not yet been made.

Bijur described a future that would see Intelsat simultaneously using GEO to move “big bulky traffic like video” whilst at the same time using LEO for those online office applications it’s so good at.

He confided that Intelsat has also played with a lot of other antenna hardware. “When you go to AIX [Aircraft Interiors Expo], there are so many antennas and so many people saying they can do stuff and half of them really can. I’ve been really impressed so there is a lot of cool new technology out there. I’m interested in what Greenerwave put out… There is some cool stuff that I’m very interested in and we think is great.”

Panasonic Avionics is also offering multi-orbit IFC inclusive of OneWeb LEO service, though it has not yet announced a launch customer. SpaceX, meanwhile, has announced a handful of commercial airline customers for its LEO-only Starlink Aviation service, notably including Panasonic Ku IFC customer ZIPAIR (with multiple over-water flights to the US and Canada), Viasat GX customer Qatar Airways and Hawaiian Airlines.

Unlike the cruise market, where SpaceX has pursued a partnership/reselling approach (which is working out very well indeed for SpaceX), the company is eschewing integrators in commercial aviation to offer a direct, portal-free IFC solution. It has made headway with its rollout on Hawaiian, an airline located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that boasts some of the longest over-water routes in the world, and ergo may better fit the LEO-only demand profile.

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• Anuvu now targeting mid-2024 for MicroGEO satellite launch
• Panasonic’s Wade on how OneWeb LEO differentiates in aero

Featured image credited to Intelsat