Aircraft

Seamless Air Alliance aims to improve in-flight connectivity

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The Seamless Air Alliance aims to make in-air connectivity faster, cheaper and more reliable
The five founding members of the Seamless Air Alliance
Airbus
The Seamless Air Alliance aims to make in-air connectivity faster, cheaper and more reliable

In a bid to make in-flight connectivity as fast, reliable, and cheap as it is on the ground, Airbus, Delta, OneWeb, Sprint, and Bharti Airtel have teamed up to create the Seamless Air Alliance. The goal is for airlines to work with affiliated mobile services and use satellite technology to provide passengers with the same high-speed, low-latency connectivity as terrestrial services.

We live in an interconnected world where the first instinct of many people with a minute to kill is to reach for their mobile device. Bringing such wireless connectivity to air passengers seems like an obvious next step, but almost two decades of work on the problem has been less than successful. Using in-flight Wi-Fi at first seemed like a technological marvel, but has since become the grit in the salad of air travel with slow, expensive, and unreliable service having become the norm.

The five founding members of the Seamless Air Alliance
Airbus

To correct this situation, the founding five members of Seamless Air Alliance plan to cut costs and improve in-air mobile services to make them seamless and available throughout the entire flight – including on routes over polar regions. It's also expected that other industry operators will get onboard with the Alliance, which aims to cut costs and address technical difficulties associated with in-air connectivity. The implementation of standards, interoperability across airlines and networks, and integrated billing will all contribute to this.

"Easy-to-use, high-speed connectivity is part of the next revolution in aerospace," says Marc Fontaine, Airbus Digital Transformation Officer. "We're excited to create this seamless experience for our airline customers and their passengers. As we showed with our Skywise aviation data platform, Airbus is committed to innovation that creates value across the aviation industry."

Source: Airbus

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2 comments
highlandboy
Just entering an alliance doesn’t put the infrastructure in place. There is a reason SpaceX is planning on putting over 1000 satilites in low earth orbit.
notarichman
just because i'm ignorant on these issues; here's my question; in northern canada and/or greenland couldn't a land based station solve the connectivity problems in that area? same thing at different ocean sites?