Gogo Business Aviation has completed its seven-tower, air-to-ground 5G testbed ahead of the company’s launch of a 150-tower nationwide network in the second half of the year. Sites in the testbed network include remote and populated areas to ensure the network can operate in a variety of environments.

Expected to deliver about 25 Mbps on average with peak speeds in the range of 75 to 80 Mbps, Gogo 5G has been designed to deliver high throughput with very low latency to address the increasing demand for data-heavy interactive services such as videoconferencing. “We'll now begin testing and fine-tuning our network performance, including tower-to-tower handoffs, range, and coverage,” said Gogo senior v-p of customer operations Dave Glenn.

Additionally, Duncan Aviation continues to work on completing the first-article STC for the onboard 5G system. Using that experience will enable Duncan to modify all its full-equipment Gogo Avance L5 STCs to include Gogo 5G, which will cover more than 30 aircraft models. Ohio-based Jet Edge International is the launch customer for Gogo 5G.

Gogo 5G uses frequencies between 2.423 and 2.475 GHz, not the C-Band spectrum (3.7 to 3.98-GHz range) being employed for 5G service by wireless carriers that potentially could interfere with aircraft radio altimeters.