Why Seamless is introducing Viper to measure IFC performance

Late last year, several airline members of the global inflight connectivity standards group Seamless Air Alliance approached the executive team with a problem.

After putting blood, sweat and tears into producing an inflight connectivity (IFC) Analysis Toolkit as well as a Seamless Certified Service Quality certification program, most service providers weren’t getting certified.

The IFC Analysis Toolkit enables airlines and their suppliers to speak the same language when buying and selling inflight connectivity solutions, whilst the Seamless Certified Service Quality program arms airlines with the ability to track the IFC experience that is being delivered to their passengers using a set of industry-agreed measurements and a consistent method for calculating them. This in turns ensures that airlines can trust the performance metric claims and commitments made by suppliers.

Both of these Seamless products are extremely timely, arriving when industry is seeing both exponential growth in demand from passengers for seamless inflight connectivity, and in the variety of IFC options available — including satcom-based solutions powered by Ku-band satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO); Ku-band satellites in geostationary (GEO) orbit, Ka-band satellites in GEO as well as Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), hybrid LEO/GEO; hybrid MEO/GEO; plus new Ka-band LEO-powered offerings coming down the pike.

Yes, LEO/MEO/GEO, and even HEO (Highly Elliptical Orbit) satellites are in play and with them a host of possible combinations including hybrid Ku/Ka LEO-LEO in the future.

(Spare a thought for the airline executives tasked with making next-gen IFC decisions to meet the needs of passengers. If connectivity is required for humans to function and prosper in a modern world, then it is a human right. Top tier, full-service airlines know that providing an ‘at home’ experience in the sky has become the table stakes in their realm.)

And yet, to date, the only Seamless Certified service provider is Thales, which uses capacity from the SES-17 Ka-band GEO satellite over the Americas to deliver broadband IFC to Spirit Airlines’ passengers. According to Seamless, “Use of Seamless Certified suppliers ensures airlines they can trust the performance metric claims and commitments made by suppliers conform to the standard.”

As to why more service providers are not getting Seamless Certified, Seamless CEO Jack Mandala tells Runway Girl Network, “It’s not for lack of trying. Airlines have been pushing; we’ve been pushing, and the service providers don’t want to offer up this data.”

Service providers do measure IFC of their own volition, and have their own customized measurements in place. “Each managed service provider has developed very sophisticated monitoring technologies,” notes Seamless thought leader Peter Lemme.

They’ve gone off in different directions, so each service provider has a unique perspective on how to assess the quality of their service. And of course, contractually, there’s skin in the game. The airline and the service provider have to make some agreements on what standard performance to expect.

And the problem an airline faces is, with one service provider you have at least a perspective across their whole fleet that’s consistent. But when you have more than one service provider, an airline is left with a very difficult circumstance in how to compare the performance of a sub-fleet with one service provider compared to the performance of the other sub-fleet with a second service provider because the measurements aren’t the same and they can’t be compared against each other.

That’s why airline members of Seamless approached the executive team with the idea that Seamless should be the neutral arm’s length provider of this data.

The alliance’s answer for members? Viper, a new Seamless software service that will measure inflight Wi-Fi performance for airlines by tracking and reporting on the performance of satellite networks.

Viper sounds like an ominous name for a piece of software, and if you’re a service provider that is consistently not meeting your service level agreements (SLAs) with airlines, perhaps it will be seen as such.

But the name is intended to combine “Vital” and “Performance” to describe the data being delivered.

“The Viper service platform will collect satellite network performance data and deliver actionable insights to airlines and their service providers, leveraging the same SAA defined metrics that are familiar and in-use today,” says Seamless, which contracted GlobalReach Technology to translate the Seamless defined measures into a turnkey commercial service offering. Viper measures application performance, including browsing and streaming performance, and provides a quality of experience (QoE) score.

The software can be integrated with an airline’s portal, offered as a standalone URL or run via an app on crew devices, “anyway that you want”, said Mandala.

In the end, what we’re providing, what this data provides is an indicator that something’s wrong, that there’s a coverage gap or a bandwidth issue… So, the service provider and the airline has to recognize it — number one — so that’ s the purpose of it; and work on it, do the root cause, corrective action, [or perhaps decide] ‘okay, we’ve got to allocate more bandwidth to that area of the flight path’ or whatever the issue is.

The reporting system, which will evolve over time, has been designed to be “exception-based”, i.e. based on the data analysis process that identifies and analyzes deviations between actual performance and expected outcome, notes Mandala. Reports will be provided by Seamless on a daily, weekly or indeed monthly basis, as desired by the airline, and a flat-rate subscription fee includes monitoring of every plane in an airline’s fleet.

Seamless’ Viper enters a space where companies like Neuron and NetForecast have made gains. And indeed, Viper already has its first customer, in the form of Alaska Airlines, which is both a member of SAA and a contributor to developing the connectivity metrics.

The carrier, which recently closed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines, has multiple service providers: it operates Boeing 737 aircraft fitted with Intelsat (previously Gogo’s) GEO-based 2Ku IFC solution and is in the process of bringing Intelsat’s multi-orbit LEO/GEO offering (inclusive of Eutelsat OneWeb LEO service) to Embraer E175 regional jets (replacing Intelsat-managed legacy Gogo air-to-ground IFC). Hawaiian, meanwhile, is a customer of SpaceX’s Starlink LEO-based IFC, having fitted its entire Airbus A321neo and A330 fleets with the electronically steered antenna system.

Hawaiian Airlines A321neo takes off with Alaska Airlines tails parked at their gates, in the background

Alaska Airlines will have Intelsat 2Ku, Intelsat multi-orbit ESA, and SpaceX Starlink, as well as Intelsat-managed legacy ATG connectivity for a spell. Image: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren

Alaska’s director, inflight product & experience David Scotland notes in a statement that, “By leveraging this” satellite network performance data, “Viper enables airlines and operators to work together to fine tune satellite networks and deliver the best connectivity experience for our guests.”

Notably, investment capital to accelerate commercialization of the Viper service was provided by what Seamless describes as a “large European carrier” — the details of which will be revealed in the future.

Airline members of Seamless include founding member Delta, plus Aeromexico, Air France-KLM, GOL, Etihad Airways, Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines, IAG, Lufthansa Group, JetBlue, United Airlines, Air Canada, Southwest Airlines, WestJet and Turkish Airlines. Airframer members include Boeing and founding member Airbus. Telcos, satellite operators, hardware providers and service providers round out the membership.

Mandala tipped his hat to the Seamless Air Alliance’s new Airline Forum chair Anna Sieber as well as IFC Technical Forum chairpersons Brian Kirby of Telesat and Arnaud Tonnerre of Thales for their contributions to its vital standards work.

Related Articles: