Inflight internet takes off: Connecting travelers at 35,000 feet
Your long flight is about 5 hours away and you are finishing work in a hurry, loading books on your kindle to read on the flight, packing your eye patches and ear plugs to catch up on sleep. Do not worry; none of this may be necessary as your flight may just continue to keep you connected with inflight Wi-Fi. Go ahead and send the email from the flight, download your book onto the kindle and surely set a reminder to catch up on sleep lest you forget with all the hyper connectedness.
Inflight internet systems can be of two types – Air to Ground (ATG) or Satellite-based Wi-Fi systems. As you have probably guessed, the ATG systems use the same cellphone towers that are used while on land for communication. As you can probably guess, this is inefficient in a few ways – No connectivity while over sea, takes longer as signals must beam to the ground first and then back onto the satellite. Wi-Fi speeds with ATG are typically slow, about 3 Mbps. Inflight Wi-Fi that uses satellites for communication can use both Geostationary satellites (GEO), which is the older technology or Low earth Orbit (LEO) satellite internet providers like Starlink or OneWeb which is the newer technology. LEO satellites have lower transmission capacity in comparison but there is lower latency since the distance travelled by the signal is much shorter.
Satellite based internet can use either Ku-band & Ka-band. Ku-band uses frequencies between 12-18 GHz while Ka-band uses frequencies between 26.5-40 GHz. Higher frequencies may mean more available bandwidth. Ku-band offers more coverage, is cost-effective and is more reliable. Ka-band is the leading & emerging technology, delivering higher speeds but has limited geographical coverage due to the unavailability of compatible satellites. Ka-band's advantages are that it has high data transfer rates, smaller antennas and other components required for inflight wi-fi and subsequently lower fuel and design costs for aircraft.
German airline Lufthansa was one of
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