A growing number of inflight connectivity stakeholders are prepared to flexibly support a multi-vendor environment in commercial aviation should airlines decide to follow the cruise industry and pursue a ‘least cost routing’ approach to powering IFC.

As Runway Girl Network readers are aware, it’s common for cruise liners to have multiple connectivity providers and links on board (whether GEO, LEO, MEO, 5G, or Microwave), and to use edge-to-cloud network platform Quvia to intelligently route traffic via the best and lowest cost network at any given time. Service level agreements (SLAs) are simple, based on whether traffic is delivered at the right price — if the network meets a minimum threshold.

In aviation, this sort of model would give airlines more control of the aircraft cabin layer as opposed to being wholly reliant on any one satellite network.

During the recent SATShow conference and exhibition in Washington D.C. and the subsequent Aircraft Interiors Expo (AIX) in Hamburg, RGN sat down with Hughes Network Systems, Panasonic Avionics, SES and Viasat to understand how the model might play out, and how much control they’re willing to cede.

We also asked Amazon Leo and Eutelsat OneWeb for their thoughts. The former is serving the aero market directly while the latter is a key B2B partner to several integrators in the space, including Hughes, Panasonic and SES.

Hughes Network Systems

Hughes Network Systems provides LEO-only, GEO-focused, and multi-orbit and multi-band LEO/GEO IFC in aviation, as well as new multi-LEO IFC, as launched at AIX. It encourages multi-vendor IFC.

“I was at Carnival Corporation for five years before I returned to Hughes to run the aviation business, and that’s exactly what we did. The whole strategy was around pivoting from a single provider to a multi-provider and the cruise line being able to manage and curate that, which proved to be very effective. So, absolutely it would be fantastic to get that done in aviation,” Hughes senior vice president and GM Reza Rasoulian told RGN.

He continued:

I think we’re getting there. I think it’s possible. I think some airlines want that level of control and others don’t. From a Hughes perspective, we’re happy to participate and help an airline in that journey or we’re happy to curate the whole experience. So, I think it’s a necessary step.

It is more difficult in aviation because of the certification and installation nuances and the importance of that; [it’s] not to be minimized, it’s important. In cruise, you can obviously install antennas with the ship captain’s approval and you have a wait process that you go through and check the box, and that’s it. Obviously, in aviation it’s more difficult to add, so I think we’re working very hard to solve that.

In the near-term, however, Hughes is focused on serving as the key integrator and managed service provider. In announcing its new multi-LEO ESA-based system, for which it will apply its Hughes Fusion managed service, the firm said it can offer network access to current capacity partners such as Eutelsat OneWeb or Telesat, and enable new capacity partners to join the ecosystem, “while maintaining a single SLA.”

“As airlines scale with fast, free, always-on Wi-Fi across their fleets, architectures reliant on single networks will reach commercial and/or technical limits. With our innovative, flexible, advanced antenna system and the Hughes Fusion managed service, airlines can finally keep their connectivity options open as satellite networks come to market with minimal to no modifications onboard their aircraft,” Rasoulian said.

Panasonic Avionics

In recent years, Panasonic Avionics has taken an agnostic view of IFC. For instance, it happily supports the integration of various connectivity pipes, including SpaceX Starlink, to its embedded IFE systems.

It also now offers LEO-only, multi-orbit LEO/GEO, GEO-only and soon LEO-LEO IFC, the latter via a partnership with China’s Spacesail which will see two separate ESA terminals installed atop each fuselage, one to support Eutelsat OneWeb LEO service (for which Panasonic is a service distribution partner in aero) and one for Spacesail LEO service.

Panasonic’s flexibility extends to the concept of a multi-vendor ecosystem in aviation.

“Least-cost routing has been around forever, and even in the early days of aviation, where you had the cabin communication units with multi-purveyors, least cost routing was built into that. So, the concept of least cost routing is very applicable to aviation and to manage multiple networks, as I do think we’ll have multiple networks on airplanes,” Panasonic Avionics VP of connectivity John Wade told RGN.

“If you accept the concept of multiple terminals, or simultaneous multi-app, multi-beam, then you can actually get to the point where that is a legitimate technology that can be introduced.”

However, in detailing Panasonic’s plan for LEO-LEO with Spacesail, Wade noted that the firm wants (and intends) to integrate the networks.

“We’re agnostic because we don’t operate our own satellites. So we can actually do ‘least cost routing,’ best in class,’ or however we want to establish them as a service. But we will take on board the responsibility to integrate those networks. And if you think about having two terminals to operate on different networks on the same airplane, that’s been a goal of the airlines for a long time. You can actually start to do network bonding,” Wade explained. Panasonic intends to bring the total speed of both the Eutelsat OneWeb and Spacesail networks at the same time, and operate them simultaneously.

SES

SES currently supports multi-orbit MEO/GEO and LEO/GEO IFC solutions, and is preparing to graduate to next-gen meoSphere + LEO IFC (or indeed meoSphere + GEO when desired) IFC in the future.

The satellite operator and aero ISP believes that a multi-vendor paradigm will ultimately emerge in aviation, though company senior product executive Blane Boynton reckons it will be colored by whether or not BYOL (Bring Your Own License) IFE takes hold, whereby passengers access their own streaming services including over the seatback (should the requisite agreements be brokered between studios and airlines.)

That said, SES is not interested in being a backup link to any IFC service, with Boynton confirming to RGN:

We’ve been pretty emphatic about multi-orbit is the solution. In the long run, we want to provide an on-network portion of the service provision or a partner network portion of the service provision wherever possible. So opportunities where we are relegated to being a backup link in aero are not really on the table.

“It’s a differentiator,” he said of the firm’s multi-orbit focus, including the MEO/LEO IFC offering that will be anchored around meoSphere.

“And frankly business is good. We’ve got a lot of demand.”

Eutelsat OneWeb

Eutelsat is a key partner to Hughes, Panasonic and SES, and its OneWeb service powers the LEO portion of their ESA-based multi-orbit connectivity solutions.

Company president of connectivity business unit, Eva Bisgaard, said she is hopeful that a multi-vendor paradigm emerges in aviation “because it’s going to deliver more security and more resiliency” to airlines than, say, the full-fleet deals being brokered with a single vendor, making airlines wholly reliant on that vendor.

“I think right now, what we really need to see is basically the airlines becoming more conscious about how critical infrastructure is going to be in the future on an airline, and then make sure that they take the right decisions in terms of both data security and resiliency so that they won’t end up in the situation where everything could suddenly get stopped.”

Noting that energy and connectivity are “central parts” of modern life, she added, “if one thing breaks, it’s quite critical, at least it can get quite critical. So I would really hope that airlines start having the understanding of how critical this becomes.”

That’s especially true as airlines seek to move more and more operational data over these pipes, she noted.

Viasat

Viasat, which offers high-capacity GEO-based IFC, and will power multi-orbit LEO/GEO IFC inclusive of Telesat Lightspeed LEO service, reckons it’s possible that a multi-vendor model will break cover in aviation, but “there’s a yin and yang to that,” Don Buchman, president, Viasat Aviation, warned.

“So the airlines want to do that. That’s a great idea. But then when something breaks, they want to know who to go talk to. So that’s one of the things, integrated versus not integrated. I do think multi-vendor is going to be an approach, and I think the vendors can kind of string it together and deliver an end-to-end service, regardless if it’s yours or not,” he told RGN, noting that we’re already seeing a similar approach to airline portals.

Said Buchman:

American Delta, they’ve done their own portals, and they’re putting them over multi-vendors. So you’re already seeing that happen today… So you’re already sort of seeing that layer happen there.

And then, as you get a multi-vendor on board, we’re going to be managing the pipe on board. We believe we can manage the pipe really well because we’ll be doing it at the packet layer. So, we have visibility that others don’t have. That’s hard to see. We know where the packet is going, what its sensitivity is.

We have really smart, intelligent SD-WAN technology that can route, make decisions packet by packet, to optimize for latency, cost and bandwidth, all three of those in one and so what it does is it gives the best possible passenger experience, when it’s available, and it does it for the lowest price for an airline so they can manage that.

Amazon

RGN put the following question to Amazon Leo, which is bringing its Ka-band LEO-based IFC solution to JetBlue and Delta, two key customers of Quvia.

There is discussion in the market about the possibility that airlines will follow cruise and take a multi-vendor approach to IFC. Is Amazon happy to support this sort of ‘least cost routing’ model (which might see the Amazon Leo ESA side alongside another provider’s ESA solution, enabling the airline to control the cabin layer?)

An Amazon spokesperson responded: “We’re happy to work with our airline customers on their rollout strategies for service and future strategies, as evidenced by our deals with Delta, Jetblue, and Airbus for HBC+. For now, we are focused on providing a great service for both connectivity and in-cabin solutions. We’ll have more to share in the future about our full IFC solution, including the cabin layer.”

Related Articles:

• SES advances multi-band ESA for meoSphere + LEO IFC
• Amazon Leo ESA, ThinKom Nexus and Starlink kit break cover
• How Airbus is working to facilitate Delta Air Lines’ IFC vision
• Viasat readies for new AERA with ViaSat-3 F2, multi-beam ESA
• Panasonic, Spacesail to launch multi-network LEO IFC in 2027
• How Quvia helps airlines throw out the IFC playbook and take control

Featured image credited to istock.com/Herbert Pictures