{"id":1811,"date":"2020-09-08T11:28:36","date_gmt":"2020-09-08T09:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=366566"},"modified":"2020-09-08T11:28:36","modified_gmt":"2020-09-08T09:28:36","slug":"in-flight-wi-fi-demand-surges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/2020\/09\/08\/in-flight-wi-fi-demand-surges\/","title":{"rendered":"In-flight Wi-Fi demand surges"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Thousands of passenger planes are still grounded, but in-flight internet is surging to new highs.<\/p>\n

Data traffic over satellite company Inmarsat Group Holdings Ltd.\u2019s European Aviation Network rose to a record in the final week of August, according to Chief Executive Officer Rupert Pearce. Global airline traffic was still down almost 80% in July compared to the same month a year earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt suggests there\u2019s some semblance of normality beginning to return to some segments of the aviation market,\u201d Pearce said in an interview. He pointed to a partial recovery in short and medium-haul flights after pandemic travel restrictions were eased.<\/p>\n

The data rebound also reflects new internet habits formed under lockdown, said Alexander Grous, an expert on airline strategy and economics at the London School of Economics, who has previously written research on behalf of Inmarsat.<\/p>\n

\u201cLots of users are basically two to three times more likely now to connect and stay connected on board than they were at the beginning of the year, before Covid,\u201d Grous said by phone.<\/p>\n

The potential for an airline data boom may reassure the institutions that bought Inmarsat last December in the U.K.\u2019s second-biggest take-private deal of 2019.<\/p>\n

The $3.4 billion acquisition by Apax Partners, Warburg Pincus, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Ontario Teachers Pension Plan was partly a bet on surging airline connectivity.<\/p>\n

Inmarsat\u2019s European Aviation Network has been ramping up capacity since its launch in July 2019. The company partners with terrestrial mobile networks like Deutsche Telekom AG and can deliver up to<\/span> 100 megabits per second to a plane.<\/p>\n

The in-flight broadband business was \u201cgoing gangbusters\u201d when the buyout deal was struck, said Pearce. A few months later, Covid-19 left many airlines fighting for survival.<\/p>\n

Last month, rival satellite operator Intelsat SA bid $400 million for Gogo Inc.\u2019s inflight Wi-Fi business, in another long-term bet on in-flight internet. Gogo has no satellites of its own and buys capacity from satellite operators to connect its onboard modems and antennas.<\/p>\n

More deals may be in the offing.<\/p>\n

The Intelsat-Gogo deal is \u201ca logical move,\u201d said Pearce. \u201cThere may well be assets that come up that make sense for us to agglomerate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now read: How much it costs to watch Netflix on Vodacom 5G<\/a><\/h3>\n

Source: MyBroadband<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thousands of passenger planes are still grounded, but in-flight internet is surging to new highs. Data traffic over satellite company Inmarsat Group Holdings Ltd.\u2019s European Aviation Network rose to a record in the final week of August, according to Chief Executive Officer Rupert Pearce. Global airline traffic was still down almost 80% in July compared to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interwebdev.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}