The in-flight connectivity (IFC) market is at an inflection point as airlines have embraced the free model and Starlink has made deep inroads into the market over the last two to three years. All of this begs the question as to whether connectivity based on LEO will prove the top choice of airlines going forward or whether a more nuanced multi-orbit approach could win out.
In this feature, Via Satellite interviews SAS, Aeromexico, Japan Airlines, and Ethiopian Airlines about their IFC plans, their technology roadmap, the impact of Starlink, and how they view services based on Geostationary Orbit (GEO).
SAS Explains Starlink Adoption
SAS is one of a number of airlines that is partnering with Starlink, signing a deal with Starlink at the start of 2025. The Swedish-based airline has long been seen as an IFC pioneer in Europe. Axel Svensson, head of Inflight Digital Experience and Connectivity for SAS explained very directly why SAS partnered with Starlink. He said the “honest answer” was that the performance gap was “too large to ignore.”
SAS evaluated the market carefully and what Starlink offered in terms of throughput, latency, and consistency Svensson said “wasn’t comparable to what traditional GEO providers could put on the table.”
“Critically, time to market was a key decision factor. Legacy players are developing LEO antennas that tap into newer constellations, but those roadmaps were too far out,” he said. “We couldn’t afford to wait. Starlink could deliver now, at the quality we needed, and that settled it.”
Svensson expects Amazon Leo to emerge as a serious threat in this arena. “The player I watch most closely is Amazon Leo, and I think they’re structurally better positioned than the other challengers for a specific reason: they already have the organization, the capital, the manufacturing capability, and the global infrastructure in place. When Amazon is genuinely competitive in aviation, which I expect sooner rather than later, I think we’ll see a healthier market for airlines.”
Embracing Hybrid Architectures
Other airlines prefer to take a multi-orbit approach than pure LEO for IFC. Alejandro Ramirez Ochoa, head of IFC for Aeromexico, one of Latin America’s largest airlines, said the airline’s IFC roadmap is focused on evolving toward a multi-orbit connectivity strategy. Over the next two years, the airline is evaluating and preparing for solutions that can leverage both GEO and LEO satellite constellations.
“This hybrid approach is expected to enhance coverage, improve performance, increase network resilience, and provide greater flexibility to support the growing connectivity demands of our passengers,” said Ochoa. “Our objective is to ensure that Aeromexico remains at the forefront of onboard connectivity by adopting the technologies that offer the best combination of reliability, performance, and value for our customers.”
Explaining why Aeromexico prefers a multi-orbit approach, Ochoa says, “No hay que poner todos los huevos en una misma canasta” — meaning, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Japan Airlines, one of Asia’s major airlines, recently signed a deal with SES and as part of this deal will also use capacity on Eutelsat OneWeb’s LEO satellites. Okubo Takahiro, director of Product and Services Development Department for Japan Airlines told Via Satellite that Japan Airlines had to consider its unique characteristics of its flight routes and the ability to operate stable connectivity worldwide, including over the Arctic region.
“We expect that SES’s envisioned technology for traffic sharing between LEO+GEO will efficiently complement each other’s strengths in the anticipated increase of LEO traffic moving forward. In addition, due to the unique nature of Japan’s aviation authority, we are aiming for line-fit installation, which is also one of the factors influencing our decision.”
Assessing the market, Takahiro believes the market will soon resemble the early days of terrestrial mobile phones with various satellites, orbits, frequency bands, technologies, and carriers emerging and competing in service offerings.
“Subsequently, we expect the market to converge toward a few companies providing what could be called the definitive service, integrating various technologies,” Takahiro said. “Customer demands have remained unchanged over time: they want communication that is the same as on the ground. With the advent of LEO, we believe we have nearly reached that level.”
Samson Arega Bekele, group vice president of Customer Experience for Ethiopian Airlines Group told Via Satellite that LEO-based services are “certainly changing the industry conversation” because they address several historical pain points associated with IFC, particularly around latency and throughput. However, Bekele does not believe GEO systems will “disappear overnight.”
He believes GEO infrastructure still offers significant advantages in certain applications, including coverage stability, existing infrastructure maturity, and long-established operational ecosystems.
“What we are likely to see is a gradual transition toward multi-orbit architectures where GEO, LEO, and potentially MEO systems complement one another depending on operational requirements,” he added. “For airlines, the key question is not necessarily whether a solution is GEO or LEO, but whether it can consistently deliver a high-quality passenger experience across global operations in a commercially sustainable way. That said, it is clear that the industry momentum today is strongly favoring LEO-based and hybrid solutions because of their ability to deliver lower latency and significantly higher bandwidth performance.”
The Future of GEO in IFC
The market has changed quickly in recent years with the move to LEO perhaps coming faster than many predicted it would. What does this mean for the future of IFC services from GEO? Analysys Mason analyst Sukhraj Kaur said that while GEO is no longer the primary performance layer, it is not obsolete. “GEO remains relevant for coverage, resilience, regulatory access and capacity smoothing. The future is not GEO versus LEO, but GEO integrated into multi‑orbit service architectures,” she said.
She believes that other players can get close to Starlink, but not by replicating its model. “Competitors differentiate through multi‑orbit resilience, openness, regulatory reach and long‑term flexibility. Airlines are increasingly valuing optionality and fallback as much as raw performance, which creates room for alternative architectures,” Kaur said. “Airlines have struggled with inconsistent performance, complex upgrades and long refresh cycles. These frustrations have accelerated the shift toward LEO and software‑defined architectures.”
Those performance issues ring to SAS exec Svensson, who said the airline had some difficult experiences deploying IFC services on GEO satellites. “That combination, inconsistent product, partial coverage, varying quality, made it genuinely hard to sell connectivity to passengers. Managing expectations on top of that was a real challenge. There were also operational complexity issues with hardware reliability. The honest reflection is that a fragmented multi-vendor GEO setup is a difficult product to stand behind,” he said.
Svensson also echoed a point made by Emirates exec Patrick Brannelly in an interview with Via Satellite earlier this year, that latency “was a lot more important than anybody had ever said.”
“A lot of passenger frustration was compounded by poor onboard systems and clunky portals not built for success. What Starlink brought wasn’t just better satellite capacity, it was a clean-sheet approach to the whole system,” Svensson said. “Low latency was the piece that changed the actual experience, but nobody said so because they were all running GEO networks.”
Ochoa does not believe GEO-based IFC services will disappear soon, particularly because they are already integrated into many airline fleets and have proven to be reliable solutions for global connectivity. He expects to see a gradual transition toward multi-orbit architectures combining the strengths of both GEO and LEO.
“For airlines, moving from one system to another is not simply a technology decision — it often requires aircraft modifications, certifications, operational planning, and significant capital investment. As a result, I do not anticipate a rapid fleet-wide migration from GEO to LEO,” he adds.
Learnings so Far
The IFC market is still a relatively new market at less than 15 years old, even though it feels like the conversation has been around for a lot longer. Ochoa said his biggest learning has been how important connectivity has become to passengers.
“What was once considered a premium feature is now increasingly viewed as a standard expectation, even for low-cost airlines. Today, the ability to stay connected on long-haul and transoceanic flights can influence an airline’s competitiveness and, in some cases, a passenger’s choice of carrier,” he said.
Svensson says the biggest shift has been around revenue models and the move to a free service.
Svensson admitted that he thought IFC technology had progressed faster than the commercial models around it. “What surprised me was how long it took the industry to move away from the paid model, and how much energy went into defending a pricing structure that passengers fundamentally rejected,” he said. “My biggest learning is that in-flight connectivity needs to be treated as infrastructure, not a revenue line. Once you make that mental shift, everything else: pricing, investment logic, partnership strategy, follows more naturally.”
Bekele added that he thought the pace of progress had been both impressive at times, and also slower than many initially expected. As passenger expectations have evolved extremely quickly due to rapid advances in terrestrial internet and mobile technology, airlines have had to adjust and view connectivity differently. One of the biggest learnings has been that IFC is not simply a technology project, but a long-term ecosystem investment involving infrastructure, operations, customer experience strategy, monetization, cybersecurity, and digital transformation.
“Another important learning is that customer expectations continue to evolve much faster than traditional aviation technology cycles. Airlines and providers must therefore build systems that are flexible and upgradeable over time,” Bekele added.
Where the Market is Headed
Bekele says that the IFC market is entering into a “transformative phase” away from an era where connectivity was viewed as a premium or experimental feature into an environment where passengers increasingly expect seamless, always-on digital connectivity throughout their journey.
He points to the rise of LEO and multi-orbit architectures delivering higher performance and lower latency, along with the increasing movement toward free or frictionless connectivity models, as well as stronger integration between connectivity, loyalty ecosystems, and digital personalization. At the same time, there is a growing use of aircraft connectivity for operational intelligence and real-time analytics.
“The airlines and technology providers that succeed will be those that can deliver a seamless, scalable, and sustainable connected experience while balancing operational realities and long-term economics. For Ethiopian Airlines, connectivity is part of the broader evolution toward a smarter, more digitally enabled, and customer-centric airline experience,” Bekele said.
Analysys Mason analyst Kaur said that in the company’s recent research the key finding was that IFC has moved into a scale phase. “Connectivity is now a core airline capability rather than a discretionary add‑on, with LEO normalizing high‑performance connectivity across aircraft types. What stands out is the speed at which airlines have shifted from cautious trials to fleetwide commitments, particularly on narrowbody fleets. The pace of adoption and the willingness to rethink long‑standing IFC relationships has been faster than expected,” Kaur said.
For SAS, Svensson talks of how “fast and free” is enough to move the needle right now and passengers are noticing the difference. He talks of NPS scores improving, and the competitive signal is real. But he believes this particular window is closing.
“As the industry converges, it becomes table stakes, and the question shifts to what you actually do with it. That’s where the tension nobody talks about enough comes in: the better connectivity gets, the more passengers retreat into their own digital worlds onboard,” Svensson says. “That makes it progressively harder for airlines to create a shared cabin experience and sell into it. The airlines that pull ahead will be the ones who treat the connected cabin as a media environment – building data assets, loyalty loops, and retail ecosystems that work with passenger behavior rather than against it.”
Ochoa admits that from the passenger perspective, expectations continue to rise. Travelers increasingly want the same experience they have on the ground: high-quality video streaming, cloud-based applications, real-time collaboration, online gaming, and AI-enabled services. Meeting these expectations requires low latency, high bandwidth, and highly reliable connectivity.
“At the same time, airlines are seeking lighter, more efficient, and easier-to-maintain hardware, reducing installation time, aircraft downtime, and operating costs. Another key trend is the convergence of IFC and IFE, creating more personalized and data-driven passenger experiences,” he adds.
Like others, Ochoa believes the IFC market is entering a new phase of maturity, where the focus is no longer just on providing connectivity, but on delivering a seamless digital experience for both passengers and airlines.
