The Critical Link

Have you ever had an inflight experience in which you tried to connect to onboard Wi-Fi only to not have it work? Or, maybe you connected to the web but the service was intermittent. Or, perhaps the entire connectivity process was unique to that airline, with little to no consistency with other carriers with which you’ve flown.

This experience gap in the quality of connectivity service has not gone unnoticed. There is an effort underway by the Seamless Air Alliance (SAA) to address it with the ultimate mission of enabling “airlines to continually provide the best possible passenger connectivity experience.” Telesat is a proud SAA member, along with numerous airlines, aircraft manufacturers, telecom operators and service providers.

In simple terms, the SAA’s goal is to ensure that no matter which airline’s seat you’re in, as a passenger you can expect reliable inflight connectivity. Similarly, the airlines and service providers should be able to work together to ensure a consistently reliable service to the passenger.

Although contracted service-level agreements (SLAs) are typically in place between connectivity providers and airlines, there have been cases where performance measurements against the SLA are met, yet poor passenger experiences still occur.

That is why we are striving to understand the full nature of the connectivity path, from the point of presence on the ground up to the satellite down to the aircraft and ultimately to the passenger. SAA members are defining these steps, as well as the problems that may occur along the path.

At the same time, we are seeking to create common definitions, tools, measurements, and standards to close the existing quality gap in the passenger experience. This part of the process includes the Seamless Certified Quality program, a first-of-its-kind process that specifies:

• Industry-agreed measurements
• Consistent tools to calculate measurements
• A method to individually score the performance of the network, the passenger browsing experience, and the passenger streaming experience, including a composite service quality score that relates to individual measurement scores of overall passenger satisfaction.

The certification program will help build airlines’ trust that the performance metrics, claims, and commitments made by the service provider conform to standards. In addition, the service quality measurements can be used to establish baseline performance expectations, as well as provide the ability to track performance over time and compare service between multiple service providers.

I participated as a co-chair of the SAA Technical Forum, where we collected requirements from the SAA Airline Forum, and developed technical solutions that now comprise the Seamless-Certified Service Quality program. And as a company, Telesat is ready to support service providers with the required measurement metrics on Telesat satellite services to support their SAA-Certified commitments.

Telesat has a deep understanding of all the metrics necessary to measure and manage the passenger connectivity experience, including how the backhaul-specific components of network performance – latency, throughput, packet loss, and jitter – contribute to overall results.

Visitors at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg can visit Telesat (stand 2D66) or the SAA team (stand 4A10) to learn more about the Seamless Certified Service Quality program.