Inmarsat’s SwiftBroadband satellite Internet service is available so far on only a handful of business jets, and one of them was parked at TAG Aviation throughout last month’s Farnborough International Airshow. A demonstration of Internet access aboard the Fortune 50 company’s Boeing Business Jet confirmed that the Inmarsat service works well for Web-mail-type applications, but also that it can be frustratingly slow when trying to bring up content-heavy sites such as CNN.com.
Installed aboard this airplane are an EMS Satcom HSD-400 data terminal and AMT-50 tail-mounted antenna, used for accessing a single channel of SwiftBroadband. Typical data rates experienced in flight are between 200 and 300 kilobits per second, a speed that seemed inadequate for most types of Web surfing during the demonstration. It should be noted, however, that the company that operates this BBJ connects through a secure corporate VPN (virtual private network), further bogging down the data stream. Also, only a single channel of SwiftBroadband is available for now; a second channel would double the speed.
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