Intelsat and OneWeb Team-up to Deliver Fast In-flight Broadband

British-registered OneWeb, which is busy building a global constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based ultrafast low-latency broadband satellites, has agreed to a global distribution partnership agreement with rival satellite services provider Intelsat in order to offer airlines better in-flight broadband.

OneWeb has already managed to launch 428 of their small c.150kg Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based ultrafast (100Mbps+) and low-latency (sub-100ms) broadband satellites into space – orbiting at an altitude of around 1,200km – and their initial plan is to build a constellation of 648 (588 are needed for coverage – the rest are for redundancy), which is enough for a reasonable level of global coverage.

The company is already known to be working on a solution to help speed up the performance of in-flight WiFi on aircraft (here, here and here), which is often supplied via capacity from satellites. During one recent test, OneWeb was able to deliver speeds of 260Mbps download and 80Mbps upload aboard a test flight (this capacity is shared between many users), all while operating at “well under” 100ms (milliseconds) of latency. The best existing in-flight systems, when dependent upon satellite, tend to reach up to around 50-100Mbps and often suffer extremely slow latency times (e.g. 600-4000ms).

The new partnership agreement could potentially let Intelsat distribute OneWeb’s LEO services to every airline in the world, coupled with Intelsat’s inflight connectivity experience and existing geo-stationary (GEO) satellite service. The plan is to get their “multi-orbit solution” into service by 2024.

Ben Griffin, OneWeb’s vice president for Mobility Services, said:

“This is a watershed moment for the inflight connectivity market, and we’re excited to work together with Intelsat to bring our multi-orbit solution to commercial aviation. We’re committed to delivering the most differentiated and innovative solution for airlines.

We are proving that, through the power of partnership, a superior suite of multi-orbit capabilities can be offered to better serve the growing connectivity needs of the commercial aviation industry, delivering the highest value coupled with the lowest risk.”

However, such services are often only introduced to existing aircraft during major refit programmes, which are usually preceded by lots of product testing. Put another way, it’ll probably be a fair while before you’re using OneWeb’s service on a flight, unless you’re lucky.

At this point it’s worth remembering that OneWeb’s big rival in the LEO space (no pun intended) – Starlink (SpaceX) – are already in the process of signing deals with a number of airlines. Starlink also have an advantage in terms of their scale and maturity of deployment, while OneWeb’s launch plans have suffered a delay due to the fallout from the war in Ukraine (here).