April 2024 Runway Girl Network Article
April 20, 2024
ThinKom on unsticking airlines with a sticky multi-orbit antenna
Below are excerpts from Runway Girl Network's article from April 20, 2024 after interviewing our CTO, Bill Milroy at APEX Tech earlier in the year.
ThinKom’s low-profile ThinAir VICTS antenna hardware, which already supports IFC on Inmarsat-now-Viasat’s GEO-focused next-gen Global Xpress installs ... is in fact multi-orbit capable.
For example, airlines can choose the VICTS hardware as part of Safran Passenger Innovations’ HBCplus terminal for Airbus, and power connections with SES as MSP for its forthcoming Ka-band multi-orbit IFC service.
When Telesat’s Ka-band Lightspeed LEO network is ready for primetime — and with it the ability to support 800 Mbps down and 200 Mbps up, according to Milroy — ThinKom’s VICTS hardware in the world fleet will technically be able to talk to Lightspeed, providing the airline owner strikes a deal with the satellite operator for the service portion, and executes on an overnight modem change. No changes will need to be made outside the aircraft, noted Milroy [ThinKom CTO].
“From a stickiness standpoint, the ultimate mission from an airline, we believe, is if you put hardware — hopefully ThinKom hardware, but someone’s hardware — on your plane and it’s future proof. So, what I mean is when it comes time to renegotiate your contract for service or services, it could be with a GEO or LEO [or indeed MEO] or both.”
This sort of flexibility — the ability to retain antenna hardware whilst swapping MSPs, at least those that play along — is the very basis of Airbus’s linefit HBCplus program. But the concept will also gain traction in the retrofit world. And, in the future, “you will have a software-defined modem and it will just be a software upgrade overnight, and you won’t touch the hardware and you will be on the new service,” noted Milroy.
Read the full article.
Photo courtesy of Runway Girl Network from SATELLITE 2024.
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