Complementary connectivity
The future is hyper flexibility and resiliency and JetWave X is the portal, says Honeywell’s Adam Sheppard. Words by Rob Hodgetts
Honeywell’s JetWave X terminal will be online in 2026.
Complementary connectivity
The future is hyper flexibility and resiliency and JetWave X is the portal, says Honeywell’s Adam Sheppard. Words by Rob Hodgetts
THE KEY to bread and butter is the and. It does some unspoken heavy lifting. It is not, after all, bread or butter.
That’s how Honeywell Aerospace views the connectivity landscape. As business aviation’s “fastest moving market”, competition is fierce.
But while the hype in some connectivity quarters is around various LEO satellite networks, Honeywell Aerospace believes its next-generation GEO platform offers a “stable, low-risk, future-proof” solution. And the modern thinking is to have both.
“We like to say that we play nice with others. We are an ‘and’ system, not an ‘or’ system,” says Adam Sheppard, general manager, Inflight Connectivity, at Honeywell Aerospace.
The company’s JetWave X product, a next-generation Ka-band connectivity solution, builds on its JetWave system, harnessing Viasat’s legacy GEO satellite network as well as the new ViaSat-3 GEO constellation, with the ability to also access future Ka-band networks.
“LEO is certainly very beneficial in a lot of ways, specifically latency. But GEO is not going away,” says Sheppard. “There’s a reason why most governments in their military mission use a geostationary satellite: it’s because the stability of the performance and the connection is much, much better and the risk of transitioning to the multiple satellites is a lot lower.”
But the “no.1 value prop” of JetWave X, and the direction of travel for connectivity in general, is that it aims to be “very flexible, very network agnostic,” says Sheppard.
In other words, it is not restricted to one specific GEO Ka-band network.
He likens it to the launch of the iPhone in the US in 2007 when it was exclusively on the AT&T network.
“Right now, we’re at that inflexion point where the iPhone is still locked to AT&T. That is 95% of all of the terminals on the aircraft right now. They’re all locked to a single satellite constellation,” he says. “We think we’re on the path to unlocking it to multiple networks.
Adam Sheppard is general manager, Inflight Connectivity at Honeywell Aerospace.
Honeywell’s Jet Wave X is its next-generation multi-network platform.
“Eventually you will select your system and then you will be able to select the network on which you’re on.”
Like the cell phone analogy, opting for different networks will be like switching SIM cards.
“When we originally launched JetWave, there were really only one or two solutions on the market,” says Sheppard. “It was very limited from a customer perspective. Fast forward to where we’re at now, and like any market, competition drives innovation, it drives price, usually downwards, and gives you choice.”
Already, JetWave X can operate on two networks after the 2023 merger of Viasat and Inmarsat gave Honeywell Aerospace access to the geostationary Global Xpress constellation and the new ViaSat-3 system. “They are very disparate networks,” says Sheppard. “So we came out of the box with a two-network resilient solution.” By adding another modem on board, users could access a third network.
Sheppard adds: “So you’re not only opening up the value chain at the terminal level, but you’re opening up the value chain at the network level as well.”
Honeywell Aerospace’s second pillar for JetWave X is “longevity” and the ability to adapt as the connectivity landscape changes.
“The space side is actually just as competitive as the terminal side,” says Sheppard. “So to put a system on your aircraft that’s locked, which you may then have to swap out in three to six years — really, does it do you justice? Ten to 15 years is where you want a system on the aircraft to be until you have to replace it.”
The third key component to JetWave X is the “upgrade path” for original JetWave users. All the wiring is compatible, typically it just requires a new tail-mounted antenna inside the existing radome, a modem and a battery pack. This renders the installation much less intrusive than starting with a whole new system, such as Starlink or OneWeb, says Sheppard.
“It’s really about flexibility, longevity and simplified installation,” adds Sheppard.
Traditionally, users with multiple satcom solutions would have a high-throughput system (transmitting large volumes of data at speed) with a low-throughput system as back-up. And there is still a “significant amount” who will opt for either a LEO or GEO system, Sheppard suggests.
But he argues that competition has driven down prices to the extent that some users are moving towards having two high-throughput systems for greater performance and resiliency.
In practice, the user on an aircraft should not be aware what network they are operating on, says Sheppard.
He gives the example of a large business jet equipped with both LEO and GEO access. One passenger is playing a handheld Nintendo Switch game, one is watching live TV and another is watching Netflix.
JetWave X has software embedded in it that can help decide whether the live TV is better on GEO or LEO; it will route the Nintendo over the LEO network for lower latency and put the Netflix on GEO to take care of buffering.
“You shouldn’t care what satellites you are on,” he says. “Our software on the aircraft and on the ground finds the highest performing, most stable network for you and puts you on that one. You just care that your system is performing the way you want it to perform.”
He adds: “It’s just a hyper-resilient, hyper-flexible solution. The goal is just to provide an always-on communication.”
Regulations, geopolitics and sentiment are other reasons why access to multiple satellite networks is gaining favour in the event one suffers a setback, says Sheppard.
“The ability to operate in China and India and some of those other countries is an issue,” he says. “The frustration for some customers is just, ‘I’m trying to keep my aircraft up and operational, I don’t really want to think about what could happen to all these constellations. I just need the internet to work.’
“We recently had a conversation with a very prominent company in the US, which flies to China at least twice a month. The conversation was fairly easy.”
The appetite for paying for two systems tends to diminish the smaller the aircraft are, based on cost and likely mission profiles. But other factors can determine clients’ preferences.
“We had one customer who had a Starlink system, but it was kind of noisy,” says Sheppard. “The fairing that went over the antenna was rattling in flight. We were like, ‘we’re in the tail so it’s no noise, no rattling. It’s as far away from you as possible. And on top of that, you’re not poking holes in your fuselage, which could lead to corrosion or warranty issues.’”
Sheppard suggests educating clients is the hardest piece of the puzzle, given how fast the connectivity space is evolving. But he maintains that “and” is the most important word.
“We have that future-proof system, that flexibility, resiliency and redundancy,” he says.
“The frustration for some customers is … ‘I don’t really want to think about what could happen to all these constellations. I just need the internet to work.’”
