The Seamless Air Alliance is expanding its remit. Rather than just defining standards and managing compatibility of inflight connectivity systems the group has branched out into developing a monitoring service, dubbed Viper, to help its member airlines track the quality of the internet experience on board. Viper officially went live in late October, with Alaska Airlines as the first Seamless Air Alliance member to activate the service.
It is one scoring system that the airlines collectively agree upon. And we want it that way so airlines looking at multiple service providers can use one scorecard. – Jack Mandala, Seamless Air Alliance CEO
Viper can be installed on crew devices in the cabin or a dedicated instance running on the IFC servers on board, allowing multiple options for monitoring the quality of the network connection. It also is delivered under a flat-rate subscription model, allowing Seamless Air Alliance members to install and use the service for a simple price fleet-wide. Seamless Air Alliance CEO Jack Mandala insists that not only with the service deliver “a scoring system that the airlines collectively agree on,” but also that “No one is going to compete with us on price, no one is going to compete with us on the implementation model.”
As with other network monitoring services Viper uses a custom blend of metrics to translate “typical network performance metrics” such latency, bandwidth, and other factors related to browsing and video playback into a simple “Quality of Experience” performance score rather than Quality of Service metrics.
Seamless’s Peter Lemme insists, however, that Viper’s approach is unique, that “there’s nothing else we’ve been able to model against that is equivalent.” Not surprisingly, existing players in the market tend to disagree with that view.
Seamless also hopes, similar to the others, that airlines will incorporate the scoring into service level agreements with their connectivity suppliers. Those service providers have, to date, generally balked at the monitoring standards from outside parties. They’ve reluctantly adopted them when forced by airlines, but have not gone out of their way to add additional monitoring options beyond their proprietary tools.
Perhaps that will change with Viper. After all, it is developed by an organization where some are participants. Among them, Thales and Telesat representatives co-chair the committee that developed the standards, so they’re buying in. But history has yielded more than a few false starts for Seamless in delivering a compelling offering broadly adopted by the industry.
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