About ten minutes after we departed Gary, Indiana Blane Boynton, Intelsat‘s VP of Product Development, walked down the aisle of the company’s CRJ700 to let us know that change was coming. We were switching over from the GEO satellites the company has been using to deliver inflight internet for nearly a decade to the Eutelsat OneWeb LEO satellites, the backbone of the company’s next-generation service.
The warning probably was not really necessary. The change in experience was immediately noticeable.
Great in GEO
To be fair, the GEO experience we started on was pretty darn good. The CR7 is a test aircraft and configured as such, delivering the best performance the company can offer. And as the only user initially on the network I was repeatedly pulling down data at speeds north of 150Mbps in the GEO configuration before we took off. Those numbers should put to rest any arguments that the Stellar Blu/Gilat Sidewinder antenna cannot deliver a solid link for GEO connections.
Read more: Hawaiian delivers nearly flawless in-flight internet with Starlink
But GEO has known limitations, including latency (600ms+ thanks to physical distance) and a lower return link (upload) performance. As expected, I experienced both of those early in the test flight, though video streaming to the plane was solid. Switching to the LEO constellation aims to address those challenges.
Lighting up the LEO Link
Following the switch to LEO it was time to run the same battery of tests again.
First up was another video call (via Signal) to the ground. The image quality was notably improved and audio/video sync issues mostly disappeared.
Streaming YouTube videos in HD also worked seamlessly, even as we swapped between beams on individual satellites every 10-15 seconds and between the LEO satellites every couple minutes. Skipping around within a video resulted in minimal buffering.
To test the return link performance I uploaded large files (~1.5 GB) via SFTP to a server on the ground. I was able to consistently consume nearly the entire return link budget of the aircraft – north of 30 Mbps – with that stream and not impact the user experience for others on board.
I also logged in to remote desktops to manage systems on the ground and performed other “real world” work tasks. All were demonstrably more performant on the LEO network than the GEO link.
By all empirical standards the performance on board was top notch. Admittedly, I’m just one user (of a dozen or so on board) running one set of tests, but I was unable to find any directly perceivable flaws in the network. Some of the recorded performance metrics, however, did raise questions.
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No doubt that the new offering is an improvement, especially for the regional jets where it will initially be installed. And we still have further improvements to look forward to as the companies further optimize the operations. That’s all good news for the industry, especially as airlines start activating the service for their passengers.
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