OneWeb Compatibility a Very Easy Upgrade for 2Ku

Excerpted from an Aviation Week article titled, 'OneWeb Looks To Disrupt Inflight Connectivity Market With LEO Network', Greg Wyler discusses the benefits of his LEO constellation:

OneWeb’s under-development constellation of low Earth orbit (LEO) communications satellites will largely eliminate the latency issues and inconsistency associated with today’s geostationary (GEO) satellite-based inflight connectivity services, according to the startup’s founder and executive chairman, Greg Wyler.

Greg Wyler specifically discusses Gogo's 2Ku (utilizing ThinKom's ThinAir Ku3030) being easily OneWeb compatible in the near future:

Airlines will be able to start using the system in 2020, says Wyler, but the ease of their transition to OneWeb’s satellites will depend on the hardware installed on their aircraft. Gogo’s 2Ku antenna, for instance, will be "very easy to upgrade," while some other systems "simply will not" be OneWeb-compatible.

Today’s systems are very bespoke. This is why we’ve joined with others into the Seamless Air Alliance, and you’ll see announcements on this in the near future, says Wyler.

Finally, he also mentions our ThinAir Ka2517:

ThinKom Solutions, for instance, is developing an antenna system which it says will be "fully compatible with the new low-orbit Ka-band satellite networks expected to proliferate in the next few years, as well as high-throughput GEO satellites.”

OneWeb’s satellites will operate in the Ku-band, but rival Telesat is building its own constellation of Ka-band LEO satellites. However, Wyler does not discount the possibility of including Ka-band in the future.

Read the full article here.