Gogo Marches Toward 5G Launch

During the past three months, Gogo Business Aviation has been on a tear with the development of its 5G program.

Despite a global environment that has created supply-chain woes for everything from cell phones to dishwashers to pickup trucks, the inflight Wi-Fi provider remains steadfast that it will launch 5G in the second half of this year and that the program remains on schedule and on budget.

At the end of December, the company announced that it had begun deploying its 5G network, completing construction of a seven-tower 5G testbed. That was a major milestone necessary to allow real testing to begin.

“Those seven sites will serve as a testbed for our 150-tower nationwide network,” said Mike Rupert, vice president of network operations for Gogo Business Aviation. “The testbed includes sites in both remote and populated locations in order to validate the network is operating as designed in all types of environments.”

At the Aircraft Electronics Association show at the end of March, Gogo announced it will launch 5G at NBAA in October of this year, expecting to have full STC and PMA of the 5G hardware and a nationwide network complete and fully operational.

“I’m proud of our team for completing this major milestone (the testbed),” said Dave Glenn, senior vice president of customer operations. “We’ll now begin testing and finetuning our network performance, including tower-to-tower handoffs, range, and coverage. Demand from our OEM and dealer partners for Gogo 5G is strong and we are confident that our customers will be delighted by its performance.”

Gogo says it will have continuous service with 100% coverage across the contiguous United States when it launches 5G. The Colorado-based company has sites located throughout the country, many of which are in remote or difficult-to-reach locations.

“Launching nationwide is not an easy task, especially with some of the places we have towers,” said Rupert. “But this is not Gogo’s first deployment of a network. In fact, this is will be the fourth network we’ve deployed. We have a team with vast experience and expertise – they know what they’re doing because they’ve installed our previous network equipment many times before.”

Gogo 5G is expected to deliver ~25 Mbps on average with peak speeds in the 75-80 Mbps range and has been designed to deliver high throughput with very low latency to address the increasing demand for data-heavy interactive services like video conferencing or Facetime.

In November, Gogo announced that Duncan Aviation is working to complete the first-article Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) for the onboard 5G system. Gogo's authorized dealers and OEM partners are actively pursuing multiple STCs that will certify the Gogo 5G system for installation on more than 30 business aircraft models.

In late February, Gogo received Supplemental Type Certification (STC) and Parts Manufacturer Approval (PMA) from the FAA for one of the main aircraft components – the 5G belly-mounted antenna. The STC for the multiband 5G antenna was completed by Duncan Aviation on its company-owned Citation 560XLS.

“Receiving STC and PMA for the 5G antenna marks the next important milestone in the development of Gogo 5G,” said Sergio Aguirre, president of Gogo Business Aviation. “Our team has been hard at work to bring Gogo 5G to life and every milestone we achieve gets us closer to bringing true 5G to the skies.”

So, what will 5G deliver? According to Gogo, several benefits including:

• More users connected at the same time with little to no degradation.
• Near-zero latency so you can have real-time conversations and improved video streaming.
• Much faster speeds for better internet service across all online activities.
• The only ATG network that meets the 5G standard.

“We are following all the 3GPP (international standards board) protocols and this will be a true 5G experience end to end,” Glenn continued. “Every piece of the system from the onboard equipment, including the antennas and the 5G LRU, and all the ground infrastructure which includes 5G antennas, base station hardware and software, and the data centers – all of it is 5G certified.”

According to Gogo, it’s also the first time that the same technology that is being rolled out by the large national wireless carriers is being built for aviation at virtually the same time. With previous versions of wireless technology, networks serving aviation have lagged behind what the ground carriers are providing by several years. And ongoing development and deployment is progressing rapidly.

“We have the network testbed in place and several new 5G sites have been completed since the start of the year,” said Glenn. “The aircraft antenna has PMA and we’re now working to get both STC and PMA for the 5G LRU. We have 5G equipment in our data centers and we’re making interoperability calls and conducting a lot of other 5G end-to-end testing.”

For an initiative like this, it requires a team that is focused on bringing it to life.

“Gogo 5G touches everyone in this company,” said Aguirre. “Every department, every functional area, every person is helping make 5G become a reality. It’s a company-wide initiative and the biggest thing we’ve ever done.”