Neuron arms airlines with data to make digital experience decisionsRunway Girl

Airlines and cruise lines are accustomed to hearing all sorts of connectivity claims from ISPs and integrators, including about throughput, latency, and the end user experience. But sometimes these assertions don’t correlate with reality, or the operator lacks full visibility into the many factors impacting the onboard experience on any given route. Enter Neuron, a vendor-neutral connectivity management platform that combines real-time data and AI to provide companies with what it says is “unparalleled visibility, insights and control over their connectivity, across multiple providers”.

Runway Girl Network sat down with Neuron founder and CEO Benny Retnamony at the Airline Passenger Experience Association’s APEX TECH conference in Los Angeles to learn how Neuron is enabling digital experience transformation for connected fleets in aviation and indeed maritime. What Neuron realized early on, he said, is there is very little data involved in connectivity decisions and “a lot of speculative marketing language”, with suppliers claiming their solutions can support, for instance, ‘up to 100 Mbps’, or ‘a minimum 10 Mbps’.

“We were like ‘this should be a lot more data-driven, not just the way it’s procured, but also how you operate it,’” explained Retnamony. “There should be lots more data transparency between the airline and the provider. So that’s where it all started, to be very precise, like how do we help airlines measure the end user experience and align what they’re doing on the connectivity side with the end user experience.”

Formerly known as ESpace Networks, Miami area-based Neuron doesn’t just provide a metric to measure end user experience. Its goal is to then align that metric with either an operator’s net promoter scores (NPS) or guest feedback scores, effectively taking subjective scores and correlating them with objective metrics to discover if they are in alignment or not. Retnamony explained:

So then now you’re measuring end user experience and making sure that the end user experience you’re measuring is actually aligned with what your guests want. Because the end user experience is different for different parts of the world, different passenger demographics, different routes, etc. So, you want to be sure that what you’re measuring is what your guests really want.

Understanding how services are performing on an airline’s most profitable routes — at what time of day and day of the week — can be particularly beneficial, perhaps especially now that a growing number of operators have taken a multi-source approach to their IFC equipage. To be able to say, for instance, ‘the most profitable route on this particular day of the week has a 50% chance of having issues’ is very valuable to airlines, who want to retain their customers or win them back. These are just some of the new datasets that Neuron is able to provide via its portal for airlines.

Describing the portal, the Neuron CEO said: “[Y]ou get an experience view in real time of every flight up in the air, on the ground and every flight that just got completed. So it’s real time. Like you don’t have to wait for an hour for it to come in … but you can go back and analyze how was last week in different dimensions. How was last week in the East Coast? You don’t have to be a PhD or a data scientist to [get the data].”

360-Degree Visibility & Actionable Insights graphic of an aircraft and stats regarding it.

Neuron’s portal provides a 360-degree view of how IFEC is performing and provides actionable insights to airlines. Image: Neuron

“Eventually, then, you’re aligning what you’re contractually procuring with what you’re measuring,” he continued. “So now you have data-driven procurement.” Arming airlines with this kind of deep dive data also enables them to make operational decisions about the digital experiences they’re providing to passengers. For instance, an airline might opt to change its Wi-Fi product offering to be more aligned with what the technology can reasonably support, or it might make service agreement changes or procurement changes.

In maritime, where Neuron’s solution debuted to much acclaim, some operators are using the data to make big decisions about their connectivity or service and making changes accordingly. In aviation, Neuron is in the midst of some airline trials and will soon announce a “big aircraft customer in North America”, Retnamony revealed to RGN at APEX TECH. Neuron competes with NetForecast and “a few other players” who have entered the space, he said.

Notably, Neuron is also now looking at airlines’ holistic onboard digital experience, not just the connectivity pipe because, as Retnamony noted, there ‘is a lot more to the user experience than simply data rates, bandwidth and latency’.

So whilst Neuron studies what might be impacting quality of experience (QoE) — to ascertain if there a problem with the terminal or other kit — it looks beyond the physical hardware. For example, can the passenger access the portal? If payment is required, is it easy to transact or does it prove to be a choke point? Can passengers pair their phones with the seatback IFE? Does the IFE system regularly need a reboot? Neuron is billed as being able to crunch this data on a route/day/time level to provide a fuller picture to airlines, helping them to measure, monitor, and understand what’s happening holistically.

Neuron’s offering in aviation is timely. SpaceX’s Starlink Aviation service, powered by its Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network of Ku-band satellites, has already debuted in aviation, and rival Eutelsat OneWeb’s LEO aero service is on the horizon, with the aim of supporting both LEO-only and multi-orbit configurations inclusive of geostationary (GEO) satellites. Multi-orbit connectivity is already proving to be a disrupter in maritime so Neuron already has unique visibility into the capabilities of LEO vs GEO. For latency sensitive applications, Neuron has observed “a big improvement in user experience” with LEO service, though that’s just part of the story, with Retnamony stressing: “How does it correlate with what the user is trying to do?”

That said, he reckons that getting latency to “very ground-like scenarios” has a lot of other big use cases as well.

I think we will hit that 3G moment in aviation. So, I don’t know if you remember when 3G got launched and smartphones got launched, there was like a skyrocketing of applications that happened. I think we’re at that moment based on what we’re seeing in terms of throughput to aircraft with LEO and the supply of capacity and the latency reduction plus you know you overlay that with the existing services and capacity, I think there is a 3G-4G moment and a smartphone moment happening.

This in turn “will change a lot” of what’s offered onboard including inflight entertainment, he predicted. “It will impact IFE significantly. And that’s why we expanded our focus from just IFC into holistic digital experience recently.”

For example, airlines are now thinking about putting OTT apps on seatback screens. “So I think there is a convergence story there around digital experience and I think we’re in the position to ride that wave.”

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