Nearly three years ago, Inmarsat announced it would bring together its existing geosynchronous (GEO) satellites with a small constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites (LEO) plus terrestrial 5G as part of an integrated, high-performance solution called Orchestra that would support inflight connectivity and other mobility applications.

Whether or not the LEO portion of Orchestra will be executed has been an open question ever since Viasat acquired Inmarsat on 30 May 2023 and with it Inmarsat’s Global Xpress network of GEO satellites. And so, your author put the query to company director – aviation terminal product manager Karthik Bharathan during the Airline Passenger Experience Association’s APEX TECH conference in Los Angeles: is Viasat still planning to pursue the LEO aspect of the Orchestra plan?

“[A]s far as NGSO ambitions go, that’s to be determined,” Bharathan demurred, noting that Viasat this year is focused on two Heosat-led HEO satellite launches — ASBM-1 and ASBM-2 — which will host Viasat’s GX-10a and GX-10b Ka-band payloads, extending its Global Xpress network across the Arctic region. These payloads, he said, “will close the polar coverage gap”.

In short, Viasat technically will not need LEO in order to be able to make the ‘global coverage including the Arctic’ boast to airlines as that of non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite operators.

Bharathan also intimated that offering polar coverage is perhaps less pressing than in the past due to the closure of Russian airspace, noting that many major carriers “cannot take that polar transport because it would involve Russian airspace”.

So now Air India in fact operates some of the world’s longest routes starting with SFO-Mumbai and SFO-Bangalore, 17-18 hour flight legs on the 777LR and those are the only ones which are truly traversing transpolar.

Over ten years ago, JetBlue Airways set the industry standard for providing a free streaming class of Internet service to passengers using Viasat’s high-capacity Ka-band GEO satellites. Since then, Viasat has mopped up many aircraft tails in the US, and continues to expand internationally with its solution.

But now SpaceX’s global Ku-band LEO-powered Starlink Aviation service is available to aircraft operators, and Eutelsat OneWeb’s rival Ku-band LEO IFC service is on the horizon. And two Viasat customers — Qatar Airways in commercial aviation and Flexjet in business aviation — have already indicated they are migrating to Starlink. Viasat inherited Qatar Airways as a Global Xpress customer when it bought Inmarsat. The airline charges passengers for the GX IFC service, whilst it says Starlink will support free Wi-Fi on fitted aircraft.

Among the touted benefits of LEO connectivity is that it can offer a low-latency, snappier Internet experience for passengers. But Viasat’s Bharathan noted at APEX TECH that the application layer of Viasat’s GEO connectivity “is so sophisticated now” that the user does not know when it’s buffering. And because most airlines disallow voice/video calls, there is not a pressing need to support such with a lower-latency service.

Satellite service ‘resiliency’ is also a stated benefit of LEO and indeed hybrid LEO/GEO networks. That message might resonate even more now that Viasat has encountered a deployment anomaly on its ViaSat-3 F1 Americas GEO satellite, reducing the asset’s throughput to less than 10%. In contrast, if a LEO satellite fails, an in-orbit spare can be moved into position to replace it relatively quickly. If a GEO satellite fails but is supporting a multi-orbit IFC configuration on board aircraft, then global LEO is naturally there as backup.

But Bharathan suggested that resiliency has been baked into GEO satellite design for quite some time. “So, for example [Global Xpress] GX1 and GX4 actually overlay each other perfectly and the reason for that is essentially like an in-orbit spare, we can also provide storage capacity when needed,” he said.

Similarly, the Carlsbad, California-headquartered satellite operator has some flexibility as it deploys its high-capacity, three-satellite ViaSat-3 GEO satellite constellation. The company’s ViaSat-3 F3 satellite is scheduled for a calendar 2024 launch followed in 1H 2025 by the launch of ViaSat-3 F2 (yes, later than F3, after supplier corrective actions are implemented on F2 to avoid a repeat of the ViaSat-3 F1 Americas satellite anomaly). ViaSat-3 F2 “has some very good flexibility in terms of its orbital slot because it is not restricted to serve Europe and the Middle East and Asia. That satellite can be drifted over North America and can essentially swap with Flight 1 (ViaSat-3 F1 Americas) based on where demand [requires],” noted Bharathan at APEX TECH.

In the meantime, he said, ViaSat-3 F1 will be providing mobility services “by next quarter in an impaired fashion but nevertheless it has served as the proof of concept” of the entire ViaSat-3 ecosystem including its mobility management, the ground network, the fiber optics, backhaul, etc.

For airlines that want to take full advantage of all Viasat broadband cabin connectivity-capable assets, there is an obstacle. A Viasat aero terminal is still not available in commercial aviation that can talk to the entire Ka-band fleet as a whole, both the Inmarsat-now-Viasat Global Xpress fleet and Viasat-proper’s high-capacity Ka fleet, including the impaired ViaSat-3 F1 satellite and forthcoming F2 and F3. Asked last month by RGN when such a terminal will be available, Viasat said:

“Regarding integration, we are continuing to integrate our global networks and support to further improve service quality, scale, and resilience. Interoperability in our IFC business, as it is across Viasat, remains a priority and hard work is ongoing to that end. We will keep you posted as we have more to share regarding timing.”

Related Articles:

• Telesat on why the wait for Lightspeed will be worth it in aero
• Eutelsat OneWeb to support inflight connectivity from September 2024
• Icelandair taps Viasat high-capacity Ka-band IFC for A321LR twinjets
• Hawaiian Airlines installs Starlink on A321neos with FAA blessing
• Anuvu now targeting mid-2024 for MicroGEO satellite launch
• Intelsat makes the case for multi-orbit IFC versus LEO-only
• Once an EAN adversary, Viasat cements commitment to hybrid network
• GEO satellite outage speaks to the value of Iridium LEO mesh network

Featured image credited to Viasat