Airlines Seek Guidance from Telesat on Having More Direct IFC Control

Below are a few excerpts from Runway Girl Network's June 4th article on Telesat starting to have discussions with major airlines wanting guidance on how they can have more direct control of the inflight connectivity experience.

Telesat also observed that the uplink to its LEO satellite is much stronger than GEO, boasting 'three to four times more throughput.' Even so, Telesat does not believe that traditional, mechanical gimbaled antennas are optimal for 'the throughput and experience we want to deliver to big aircraft' with Telesat LEO.

'So we’re more focused at Telesat definitely on ESAs but also antennas like ThinKom [VICTS phased-array], which are a hybrid,' said Vinnakota [Director, Product and Commercial (Global) for Telesat]. He added that last year’s testing of ThinKom’s Ka antenna over the Phase 1 LEO Satellite 'went great.' It enabled data rates of up to 370 Mbps on the downlink and 110 Mbps on the uplink.

Telesat is also working with ThinKom 'on how do we ease the transition on existing antennas in the market to the Ka model,' with Vinnakota highlighting Thorne’s revelation that Gogo (together with ThinKom) has come up with 'a smart innovative solution' to easily swap out the Ku antenna disks in its 2Ku solution to Ka disks should the need arise.

Read the full article here.