{"id":79027,"date":"2013-12-20T23:32:22","date_gmt":"2013-12-20T15:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/viasat-exec-talks-about-fly-fi-feedback-and-next-steps\/"},"modified":"2013-12-20T23:32:22","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T15:32:22","slug":"viasat-exec-talks-about-fly-fi-feedback-and-next-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/viasat-exec-talks-about-fly-fi-feedback-and-next-steps\/","title":{"rendered":"ViaSat Exec Talks About Fly-Fi Feedback and Next Steps"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

[Via Satellite 12-20-13] In-flight connectivity options are steadily becoming a must-have for airlines. ViaSat<\/b> has already begun to build off the feedback received for its satellite-based Fly-Fi Internet service, especially after the FAA ruled that passengers can use personal electronic devices from gate-to-gate. The company challenged flyers to test its new connectivity service, and many accepted.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Feedback has] been pretty positive,\u201d Don Buchman, director of mobile broadband at ViaSat, told Via Satellite<\/i>. \u201cThe system is behaving as it\u2019s designed and as we expected it to; we had pretty high confidence. The market seems to understand what the speed means and so the next question is what does it mean at scale, not just one guy on a plane or one plane full of people, but an entire fleet of airlines, and for all the people on those flights to get the same results.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fly-Fi is expected to support 50 to 70 personal devices simultaneously at 12 Mbps or more, rapidly expanding access to online content while flying. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing half to three quarters of a flight using their devices in flight,\u201d said Buchman. \u201cIt\u2019s encouraging to see what you would expect to be natural demand start to take root.\u201d<\/p>\n

While most responded positively to the new service, a criticism that arose was slow service during the first few minutes of flight. \u201cWe still have some corners to round out,\u201d said Buchman. \u201cI think at the beginning, JetBlue<\/strong>\u2019s portal may have been getting a little congested. When you have 60 people ready to go and they hit the network, you hit the portal on an aircraft and that slowness might have been the queuing of orders to get online. We\u2019re definitely rounding out the corners on these things, but those are easy things to get figured out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The upcoming ViaSat 2 satellite is the company\u2019s solution to reach these goals. The new satellite, scheduled to launch in 2016, will increase the coverage area by seven times and essentially double the bandwidth. \u201cYou can choose to give one person more at the same cost, or serve many more people marginally more, or anything in between. We plan to do both,\u201d said Buchman. \u201cThat\u2019s essentially where the market is going. More people want to be connected and when they are connected they want more bandwidth. Those are the two trends that ViaSat 2 will capitalize on.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked about feedback from competitors, speed was the main topic of interest. \u201cGogo was saying that our return link was too slow and that that\u2019s the problem with satellite \u2026 because they use air-to-ground on their return links,\u201d said Buchman. \u201cThe idea of satellite return link being slow is on contrast to one of the quickly adopted use cases of ViaSat 1, which is live HD video contribution from the field via small portable terminals. So the notion that our return links are a limiter is pretty far from reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JetBlueFly-Fi will expand into South America with the addition of ViaSat 2. Currently the service relies on ViaSat 1 and WildBlue 1 to cover North America, but ViaSat wants the service to accompany more of JetBlue\u2019s popular international destinations.<\/p>\n

\u201cJetBlue does a lot of flights into South America; into the northern rim of South America and the Caribbean \u2026 ViaSat 2 is designed to cover those routes from Canada and the Northern Atlantic Ridge out to Europe. We\u2019ve also pushed south to the Northern Rim of South America so the Bogota routes and all the Caribbean, the Yucatan Peninsula and the islands in the Caribbean, will be covered by ViaSat 2, which launches in 2016, \u201d Buchman said.<\/p>\n

Whether or not Fly-Fi will remain a free service by that time is not known. At present, the service is free until June 2014. There is also a premium option where passengers can pay to access a higher quality service. ViaSat was not able to say what will happen after mid-2014. \u201cThat\u2019s really JetBlue\u2019s call,\u201d said Buchman. \u201cWe set up our relationship to give them that flexibility.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Via Satellite 12-20-13] In-flight connectivity options are steadily becoming a must-have for airlines. ViaSat has already begun to build off the feedback received for its satellite-based Fly-Fi Internet service, especially after the FAA ruled that passengers can use personal electronic devices from gate-to-gate. The company challenged flyers to test its new connectivity service, and many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":79028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}