Photo: SES

The aviation market is hotly contested in the satellite industry — it’s a prime area of opportunity for connectivity as airlines invest in new planes and fleet upgrades. SES is bringing a new solution to the market — SES Open Orbits — which the operator says is based on an open architecture approach that allows airlines to grow and adapt as markets change.

Launched in May of 2024, SES Open Orbits is a fully interoperable Ka-band platform that combines the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite networks of SES along with partner capacity from NEO Space Group (NSG); AeroSat Link (ASL), a subsidiary of China Satcom; and Hughes Communications India (HCI).

Andrew Ruszkowski, Global Head of Aviation for SES, says the solution is built on the principles that SES believes will be necessary to meet the high expectations of passengers in the future. This partnership approach allows SES to bring a consistent, global experience to customers. He describes SES Open Orbits as a global roaming alliance.

“Through Open Orbits, we are partnering with operators and service providers that have the national and regional experience  necessary to deliver a consistent approach,” Ruszkowski says. “By bringing those partners together we are able to bring standards both in hardware and service delivery that give airlines the confidence that wherever they go, they will have the same high-quality experience.”

In addition, the MEO/GEO architecture gives airlines flexibility and allows them to scale up over time. “That is what airlines are starting to realize – they don’t like being locked into solutions that cannot scale,” he adds.

SES Open Orbits will be available on all production airframes. It is the first multi-orbit Ka-band network in Airbus’ HBCplus program, and it will be available on Boeing aircraft through Safran Passenger Innovations Aero Connect terminals. HBCplus is a new program from Airbus launched as a satellite communications solution infrastructure to provide airlines with future connectivity flexibility. Both Thai Airways and Turkish Airlines recently signed on to the HBCplus program. Thai Airways will equip 12 new A321LRs and Turkish Airlines will equip 14 new A350 aircraft with SES Open Orbits.

Ruszkowski cites the flexibility of SES Open Orbits and HBCplus as an advantage for customers, along with its partnership approach between satellite operators, aircraft manufacturers, with hardware manufacturers, and IFC integrators.

“We are bringing all of these together to build a scalable global solution that brings a consistent, quality service everywhere. One of the keys to success of SES Open Orbits will be its accessibility — giving the airlines an option to choose between a line fit approach and a retrofit approach,” Ruszkowski says.

A Changing Landscape for SLAs

In a recent article in Via Satellite, multiple airlines from the likes of Aeroméxico, Icelandair, Alaska Airways and Iberia spoke of the importance of service level agreements (SLAs).

Melanie Berry, Chief Commercial Officer of Spanish low-cost airline Vueling, spoke to Via Satellite when she was the Director of Customer Experience for Spain’s flag carrier Iberia. She said her biggest frustration is SLAs and how they are managed.

“We get lulled into a sense of security that is not correct because the reports will say the SLAs will say the service level was 100 percent, so why couldn’t X percent of our customers connect?” she asked. “I think we really need to rethink SLAs and that we are measuring the right things so we can improve things for the future.”

Aditya Chatterjee, Senior Vice President of Aviation Product Management for SES, believes the SLA construct from airlines is on the cusp of dramatic change. SES is planning for a future where airlines would require that a certain quality of experience be provided to airline passengers, be it a specified minimum speed, latency or quality of streaming video, without regard for the number of bits of capacity it takes to reach that SLA.

“Airlines will become very demanding on that passenger experience and will try to ensure this demand is satisfied through commercial and business agreements” he says.

Chatterjee believes SES Open Orbits will meet these modified and new SLA standards. He adds, “We are prepared to offer very high SLAs offering great coverage and speeds.”

As well as meeting these SLAs, Chatterjee believes SES Open Orbits offers a number of other benefits. Airline customers would no longer need to feel “throttled” by one provider. “If you look at our terminal architecture, all of the line replaceable units (LRUs) that we use are open and not exclusive to any one provider. The ThinKom antenna, which is our primary antenna, is a non-exclusive antenna. There are other providers that also use this antenna and the other components of the system.”

One unique part of such a network is that SES uses two modems inside the aircraft, a Hughes manufactured Jupiter modem and a Gilat manufactured Taurus modem. Neither of these modems are exclusive to SES, Chatterjee notes — it’s the SES Open Orbits software that makes the solution unique.

SES hopes that the combination of meeting strong, user-centric SLAs and offering an open architecture will prove to be a winning strategy.

The Antenna Piece

SES is also pursuing development of more versatile antennas, another major priority for airlines. Chatterjee says that a multi-band commercial aviation antenna is one of the goals on SES’s roadmap.

SES understands this is not a one- to two-year project, but rather a three- to four-year effort. SES will sponsor innovative terminal development companies and help to design multi-band antennas, he says.

“We need to forge this path,” Chatterjee says. “If we could build that antenna under non-exclusive conditions to make it open, we would. But we haven’t finalized whether that is technically feasible. We don’t want to go against our open architecture system. There has to be some strategic way of getting what we and customers want, yet ensuring it is open to other providers who would like to use both bands.”

Berry talked about antennas from her perspective at Iberia during her recent conversation with Via Satellite, saying that frequency agnostic antennas will be a real “gamechanger” for airlines.

“If we don’t like the option we have with option A, we go with option B. We don’t have that right now. We make a commitment to an aircraft and it is the hardware that belongs with that provider.” Berry says. “I think the development of agnostic antennas is going to give us all a lot more flexibility and a lot more choice, and maybe things will start to move a lot quicker once we get to this point.”

The Future

“If we succeed — and we will — in providing an exemplary service, we are enabling a very solid relationship with customers and increasing the number of aircraft using the network,” Chatterjee says. He notes there is great potential with the OEMs for introducing SES Open Orbits to the different types of aircraft, in line fit, retrofit, and service bulletin options.

“Our clear focus over the next 12-24 months is on both the new aircraft that are being introduced, and the existing aircraft for which the airlines are seeking connectivity.  Through OEMs and other system integrators, the SES Open Orbits solution could be extremely attractive,” he says.

According to Chatterjee, “It takes time and extreme diligence to introduce a new offering, especially an offering as innovative as ours.”  Ruszkowski agrees, and previews there is momentum around the growth of the network that SES plans to scale up the network over the next 12 months.

All satellite operators are aggressively targeting the aero segment and LEO operators are confident that they will continue to make substantial inroads.

“We are confident that an effective answer to the majority of airlines will be a solution that is resilient, scalable and flexible over time,” Ruszkowski says. “Because we are open architecture, there is no reason why we could not add LEO. I wouldn’t be surprised if we do at some point. But it has that flexibility and open architecture approach that is better than any one orbit.”

Chatterjee speaks of a future where SES Open Orbits could be multi-band as well as multi-orbit, through working with other operators as part of its network.

“We could have three orbits for one band, and three orbits for another band,” he says. “The technology would enable us to multiply the ability of the SES Open Orbits system to provide capacity to any airline.”