Dear Readers… Just when we thought we had heard just about everything about connectivity and were sure the “Big Dogs” has everything sewed up, along comes a new and refreshing solution to getting bandwidth to the plane. Yes, it is ground-based and it is simplicity itself, but the idea is one that resonated with us because it is so cool and clever. On the ground (100 stations needed), Wi-Sky has developed an electrically steered beam forming antenna that delivers approximately 45 Mbps to each and every plane in its tracked sector – it has a beamwidth of some 4° horizontal degrees. On the aircraft, another novel approach ties multiple sectored antennas together to cover the needed 360 degrees under the airplane. The signals are delivered inside the cabin via standard Wi-Fi WAP’s and with 13 channel allotments of in the band, can easily deliver a planes worth of bandwidth in one channel. The interesting part about the technology is the frequency band – unlicensed IEEE 802.11b/g and n in the 2.4 GHz band, while power levels run at an amazingly low 1 watt! Even at these low power levels, beam shaping and high gain antennas delivered (in tests) bandwidth in the 20 to 50 Mbps range. At that rate, everybody can watch YouTube (See tests below or on YouTube).

Necessarily closed mouthed, President and CEO, Grant Sharp talked to IFExpress about their testing and aspirations but there is wealth of information on their website. One thing for sure is that the shipset chipset costs of their hardware, and ground equipment for that matter, will be quite competitive with any other gear. Think about it, at Wi-Fi frequencies a lot of COTS hardware will fit the bill and with no up front frequency allocation charges, their costs will be reasonable. OK, as reasonable as avionics can get. You can meet Grant at the WAEA TC meeting in July in Everett WA. (See last weeks Hot Topic). Be sure to look up their website www.wi-skyllc.com and check out the pedigrees of the top team and if you are not conversant with ODFM, you might try the Wikipedia link too.

The Tests: Grant wrote us, “The attached video is a screen capture of an Internet Performance test (iperf) which transfers bulk data packets from our radio on the ground to the radio in the plane. At one-second intervals, the report displays how much data was actually transferred. It also calculates the data rate transfer each second. You will see that we are transferring data at a rate between 35 Mbps and 45 Mbps. In the background on the screen is Microsoft MapPoint with GPS tracking the path of the plane. Our base station radio is located in Mountain View, CA. The red arrow on the screen indicates the location of the plane. You can see that we are close to Interstate-5, which in that instance is 54 miles from our base station. The upper left corner of the screen shows the speed of the aircraft, altitude, time, longitude and latitude. During our test flight last Tuesday, airline representatives plugged in multiple computers and simultaneously made Skype video calls, previewed iTunes online, viewed a web cam of their kitchen back home, played numerous YouTube videos, downloaded an 8.8 Megabyte email attachment in a few seconds, viewed smooth-flowing video preview trailers and logged onto their VPN at their office. These tasks are simply not possible with the current slow DSL link that the airlines are offering today”

• Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi for more Wi-Fi info.
• Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Kw1qsqPRY
• Screen Shot of inflight test results (PDF)