Inflight entertainment and connectivity provider Anuvu is nearing the launch of its Astranis-made MicroGEO satellites. The capacity will be used to support Anuvu’s aero clients including Southwest Airlines.
The launch date has slipped a few times, namely because Astranis’ first MicroGEO satellite for Alaskan satellite communications company Pacific Dataport experienced a malfunction that needed to be addressed.
But Astranis tackled the problem and has been very “responsive”, Anuvu executive vice president connectivity Mike Pigott told RGN at the APEX Global Expo in Long Beach.
Indeed, Astranis’ rigorous testing, said Pigott, “has been extreme and extraordinary”.
We are highly confident in them. We are extremely happy with how they responded to that.
Space watch web sites are keeping a close eye on the program, and the latest suggest that Anuvu’s first two Ku-band MicroGEOs could launch on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on 16 December.
But Pigott would only say at Expo that Anuvu expects the launch to happen before year-end, noting that the “satellites are done” but that “the reality is that we are just waiting in the queue” at SpaceX. The two MicroGEOs will launch alongside two other Astranis satellites.
Considering the weight of the satellites, even with all four [on the Falcon 9 rocket], it’s still a very light rocket so we are hoping for a good accelerated burn on that second stage.
Also during the show, Anuvu revealed it has inked an agreement with D-Orbit USA to study the possibility of adding HEO capacity to its layered capacity approach for inflight connectivity.
A HEO play?
Pigott explained Anuvu’s reasoning to RGN:
We see the LEO constellations all developing, all great, and hey if they all meet all their requirements, we don’t need anything else right? … But we also see gaps and the gaps are national jurisdiction gaps… We see Russia, China, we see country-specific items and national jurisdictions that are going to come into play and so we looked at the market and we said, ‘okay, we could populate these with GEOs, we could populate these with MicroGEOs, we could populate these with third parties.’ But then we started to explore and we said, ‘you know what, we do want lower latency if we can get it so what is a solution out there?’
We found D-Orbit and D-Orbit is a great, innovative company, very well established in Italy, getting their establishment in the United States, so they’ve raised over $100 million in Italy recently, have a proven launch record, proven equipment, but also very cutting edge and innovative, very New Space… And so D-Orbit USA, we have been in talks with them to say, ‘hey what could we do?’
And if you look at D-Orbit USA’s team, they’re ex-SpaceX people, some ex-Project Loon people, some good pedigree people on the cutting edge of innovation. And so we saw, and said, ‘what can we do together that really is groundbreaking?’ And that’s a HEO constellation.
And the very simple explanation is one rocket, one launch, 16 satellites, full coverage over aviation air routes. Is it going to be performance that matches Telesat Lightspeed? Kuiper? Starlink? No, it’s not intended to, just like our MicroGEOs, it’s a layered item there…
So we thought, this is something we want to explore… this is something we want the market to know about because we want to get feedback on [whether] this is something customers are super interested in, how do they see the market.
Staying in the game
Even with a reduced footprint in IFC (Anuvu’s anchor client Southwest is now also a Viasat customer and Air France is pivoting to SpaceX Starlink), the company insists it isn’t getting out of the IFC game and it doesn’t think it needs to take on the Starlinks of the world.
“We’re wondering whether Starlink and the other providers want to take on what it means to deliver to the airlines,” said Pigott.
In contrast to its prior regional IFC play, Anuvu’s strategy now is to be a global provider.
“We do want to be a global provider. We want to address the global airline industry and we see a layered approach as being needed, and we see customization of a service provider, integrator, to meet particular airline needs being very, very important. We see this market being very, very important. We see APEX being very important,” said the Anuvu executive.
“There’s a reason AT&T and Verizon are not at this show because you need to deliver to airlines customized personalized solutions and providers that are delivering to millions of customers, we find airlines get lost in the noise. And sometimes the ‘lost in the noise’ is not the network, sometimes it’s everything else, whether its a portal, whether it’s traffic management, whether it’s past management, whether it’s data analytics, all of those things, we think there’s a value proposition. And we want to use multiple resilient assets to deliver.”
