A Simi Valley, California-based company hopes to conduct a fleet exercise next summer of an airborne broadband wireless network stitched together using airliners. Assuming the concept succeeds, Airborne Wireless Network (AWN) will operate as a wholesale carrier, making coverage available to customers such as internet service providers and telephone companies.
Working from a 2001 patent that it acquired in August 2016, AWN envisions a system of networked airliners plugging connectivity gaps and serving as an alternative to low-Earth orbit communications satellites. Each aircraft would act as an airborne router by sending and receiving broadband signals from one aircraft to the next, creating what AWN calls the “Infinitus Super Highway.”
The privately financed company is not alone in pursuing air-to-air broadband connectivity. Telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T are both developing airborne 4G LTE networks using drones as nodes.
AWN’s “meshed-redundancy” network consists of a radio frequency overlay that helps one aircraft find another aircraft and steer a laser antenna that transmits high-speed data, explained Marius de Mos, the company’s vice president for technical affairs and development. Signals come from multiple directions as opposed to a single-point network relying on a single uplink to a satellite or downlink to a cellular site.
“If that is clogged up for any reason you lose the connection; with a mesh you can route it through different aircraft to an available site—you can route it around weather, there’s all kinds of options, all kinds of things you can do,” said de Mos, who helped develop the original Airfone inflight telephone system.
In May, AWN announced that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had granted it an experimental operating certificate to test the mesh system in flight. On May 31, the company completed a proof-of-concept flight using two Dynamic Airways Boeing 767s over Roswell, New Mexico. The testing required FCC, Federal Aviation Administration and military approvals.
“The primary intent there was to prove that we can go plane to plane to ground and by doing that we would be able to create an airborne mesh where we don’t have to rely on a single earth station or a single satellite,” de Mos said. “We had relatively narrow bandwidth because we had a military modem—that was the only one available—and we used military spectrum for the testing. So we were limited in [(data]) throughput, but the throughput wasn’t the actual goal of the test. The goal of the test was to confirm that we could create a mesh in the sky using large aircraft.”
To participate in the future radio network, aircraft must be fitted with steerable antennas. AWN has hired a person with experience designing small-profile antennas for fighters and drones; it expects to have prototypes in the next 18 months. “Down the road [(there will be]) a nice, low-profile, high-performance antenna specifically designed for our purpose at a very reasonable price which makes it feasible to do this on a large scale,” de Mos said.
AWN has “tentative spectrum” for the system. “Basically we’re not interfering with any satellite because we’re polarized differently, so we have a lot of options as far as spectrum is concerned, the kind of options you don’t have if you go up and down to a satellite,” de Mos said. “We’re in pretty good shape there. We don’t have our final spectrum, but we’ve hired the best of the best to help us acquire spectrum.”
Later this year, the company plans a proof-of-concept flight test of the laser component of the system using two Cessna airplanes. The smaller airplanes can bank easily and break or interrupt the laser lock, requiring the radio system to re-establish the connection as it would in practice, de Mos explained.
AWN was engaged in discussions with an airline that de Mos declined to identify, with the aim of conducting a 20-aircraft flight test with interim antennas in the next 10 months. That would theoretically be the system’s roll-out.
The company’s primary business aim, de Mos said, is to provide end-to-end communications coverage for telephone companies. “The secondary application is to provide a spigot to people people like [(inflight Internet provider]) Gogo who who have a great system but have issues with connectivity because of congestion. Basically, with a laser between aircraft we could provide everybody with streaming movies at the same time at every seat of the airplane, which is physically impossible with today’s technology.”
