New planning tool helps airlines budget for satellite capacity

(n.b. – This is an excerpt of a story I wrote for RGN)

How do you plan where to point the spot beams of a satellite? How do you estimate bandwidth consumption for any given aircraft, route or airline on a daily or annualized basis? And, most importantly, how do you combine these goals to properly predict where the planes will be and how they will be drawing data through the air as they fly?

For satellite operator SES the approach to answering these questions changed earlier this year. While the company has always had some automation the latest iteration takes that to a new level, combining satellite coverage and capacity with flight schedules and path data. The net result is a powerful planning tool which can help an individual airline in budgeting for a capacity purchase or even help the company in planning coverage of a new satellite system.

Note: The image above is a hypothetical beam placement at an arbitrary orbital location and does not reflect SES’s satellite plans.