While streaming is still a hot topic, we wanted to return to our Hot Topic subject of a few weeks back. This whole subject began with an article we wrote about the possibility of streaming entertainment media to the aircraft. Obviously, even to the uninformed, bandwidth to the aircraft has to increase and the cost per bit has to SIGNIFICANTLY drop. One company who has remained on the periphery of aircraft broadband (physically and technically) is Voyant (www.voyant.aero). Their approach revolves around individual broadband beams of data, formed and steered to each aircraft, operating in the double-digit GHz range and Gigabit range. Voyant has been looking at the growth (demand) of available Internet bandwidth. After our first article, Steffen Koehler, Chief Marketing Officer sent us this note:

“Remember, these systems are supposed to have 10-year lifetimes. How much bandwidth do you think each airplane passenger is going to demand in 10 years? If history is any guide, the answer is probably about 400 times the amount that they demand now. My data show consumer bandwidth demand rising by 20x every 5 years.”

He also sent along this interesting airborne bandwidth demand chart that he developed. Of course, steering this much data requires (in their case and Wi-Sky’s approach as well) individual ground-based transmission antennas. In trying to wrap our technical arms about this concept Mr. Koehler wrote:

“You’ve got exactly the right idea on what we’re doing. We use a committed ground antenna for each aircraft. In order to ensure that there is always a free antenna for any aircraft entering the vicinity, we have to overbuild the ground antennas. On average, for each plane in the air, we have about 3 antennas on the ground. That means that the ground antennas have to be cheap, cheap, cheap! The good news is that they are. While we require a lot of antennas, the antennas themselves are pretty low-cost. When we first thought about this a few years ago, we considered omni-directional antennas, but we just couldn’t figure out how to get enough bandwidth to the planes using omnis (omnidirectional antennas). And for all the reasoning that you detail in your article, we believe that those sorts of bandwidth throughputs are a must-have. Otherwise, you might as well ignore WiFi and just put in enough cellular service for text messages.”

More next week!

Related Stuff:
Check this out: Inmarsat conference presentations

A scavenger hunt, in the air?

A techie did some inflight performance tests on Go-Go, by AirCell – Check it out here.

Lastly, Boeing’s Current Market Outlook is out. You can download it here. Note that there various opinions on the validity of their data and predictions:

• http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/archives/170935.asp
• http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/archives/171104.asp
• http://seekingalpha.com/article/143225-boeing-s-current-market-outlook