“By 2025, the amount of data generated globally each day is expected to reach 463 exabytes globally. An exabyte is 1,000 bytes to the sixth power. Good luck doing the math to figure out the overall amount of data on the internet five years from now.”
—World Economic Forum
When it comes to selecting a provider that lets you experience the same seamless, high-speed connectivity in your business aircraft that you enjoy in your office, the first question to ask isn’t about how fast its network is but about how much peak throughput capacity it can handle.
As the world returns to work and to whatever the “new normal” is, it’s a pretty safe bet that business aircraft, whether owned, chartered, or fractional, will be the preferred way to travel.
“We have a large corporate client that has stated that it does not want any of its employees traveling on commercial airliners,” says James Person, Viasat’s senior director, global business development, Business Aviation Division. “They have always operated a fleet of Embraer corporate shuttles between their various campuses, and now they are opening these flights to all employees. In addition, the company is buying new and larger shuttle aircraft.
“They came to us to make sure that their aircraft would all have adequate Wi-Fi connectivity for the 50 or so passengers on each flight,” he added. “Like many users, they are learning that while speed is important, the real key to delivering a productive online experience is the network’s overall capacity to handle all of that data throughput.”
Speed delivers. Capacity enables.
For years, consumers have been so inundated by data rate numbers that it’s difficult for them to understand the differences between a network’s speed and its capacity and what that means with regard to delivering the best user experience.
“Speed is speed. Capacity is how much of a ‘thing’ you can put through a system at any given time,” Person says. “It’s also called throughput. And in our case, that ‘thing’ is data. Data that delivers the video conferences, web searches, app updates, and emails—all the stuff we get on our devices.
“Imagine that you’re driving on a narrow, straight, one-lane highway,” Person adds. “You’re the only car on the road, so you can go as fast as you want. Cool! Now, put 10 other cars on that highway. Suddenly nobody can go that fast. The added traffic has reduced the road’s throughput capacity.
“Next, picture a 10-lane highway with one fast car on each lane. Again, with no other traffic in your lane, you’re as free as the wind,” Person said. “That highway easily has the capacity to handle the additional traffic load without slowing anyone down. It’s the same with data networks.”
So, you say, what’s the problem with slightly slowing the data flow? Well, it’s not an issue if you’re doing only voice calls or sending texts and emails. But, even a seemingly insignificant drop in capacity can really disrupt a videoconference or video stream, especially when you’re talking about your aircraft’s cabin Wi-Fi connection.
Airborne connectivity isn’t cheap. And no operator can afford the double downside of not only paying for the times when the system buffers but even worse, providing a less-than-business-quality user experience.
“The experience is what users are looking for today, and what enables that experience is speed,” Person says. “But what enables a network’s speed is its capacity. That’s not a problem if you’re the only aircraft using the network. But that never happens. The greater the number of aircraft and passengers trying to access that data at a given moment, the more likely it is that a low-capacity network will struggle.
“Capacity leads to speed, which leads to a positive online experience,” he adds.
Viasat delivers capacity to the max.
Person says that while everyone advertises fast data speeds, there are massive differences between the various airborne satellite network providers in terms of capacity.
“In business aviation especially, people have been conditioned to ask about a particular provider’s frequency band—for example, whether it’s Ku or Ka,” he states. “Nobody cares what band their cell phone works on. But we all care about the experience it delivers. If your phone delivers a slow Internet connection, you’re not happy.
“As with speed, the real question people need to ask is about total capacity,” Person continues. “The band you’re using has little to do with the network’s ability to handle its traffic load. Again, low capacity is the network killer. The closer you get to the network’s capacity limit, the slower the data travels. Slow data leads to a poor user experience.”
Viasat’s network has been built around delivering the highest throughput capacity in the business. Just how much capacity? Well, according to Person, their current network delivers 10 times the capacity of its nearest Ka-band satellite competitor. No matter how you measure it, that’s a huge advantage for Viasat’s users.
“We design and build our satellites, so we can ensure that our capacity keeps pace with demand,” he says. “Our first satellite, Viasat-1, has 140 Gbps [gigabits per second] of capacity,” Person says. “When we launched Viasat-2 in 2017, it nearly doubled that to 260[MOU1] Gbps.
“We’re launching ViaSat-3 later this year, and that each of the three satellites in that constellation will have the capacity to deliver over 1,000 Gbps [3,500 Gbps total]—that’s over one terabit per second, per satellite. The best each one of our competition’s satellites can currently deliver is 10 gigabits per second.
“You can see by the numbers just how much better of an overall online experience we can deliver to the cabins of private aircraft,” he adds. “We’ve been providing an office-like online experience to business fliers since 2009, and it’s only going to get better.”
One of the ways the company will continue to improve its network’s performance, says Person, is through a new capability introduced on ViaSat-3 that will actively transfer more power to specific satellite beams as network activity increases.
“The goal is to maintain the quality of the overall user experience, even as the number of users increases,” Person notes. “That way, the capacity of that satellite will be ‘auto-magically’ increased to meet the current demand. It’s all behind the scenes, so all users notice—or fails to notice—is that their connections are smooth and seamless.”
Viasat’s “future-proof” solution.
Like your wireless connectivity provider, each of business aviation’s SATCOM providers is working on its “next-generation” solutions. Everybody wants more speed.
“Along with our satellite constellations, we also design and build the hardware and antennas that go on the aircraft,” Person says. “Since we know what that next-generation network is going to be, we’ve designed our systems to be upgradable all along,” Person says. “Customers who have our current Ka-band systems have the confidence that they will deliver ViaSat-3’s increased capacity. No hardware changes required.”
He adds that operators with competitive systems wouldn’t have that flexibility. If they want to take advantage of new capabilities, they will have to change the hardware, antenna, and radome. That’s a lot of extra expense and downtime for their aircraft.
“We call it ‘future-proofing’ our systems,” Person explains. “What it does is protect the operator’s hardware investments on their aircraft well into the future. We know our customers value that kind of forward-thinking.
