Delivering Reliable Connectivity at the Speed of Flight

With the ability to simultaneously monitor the performance of tens of thousands of air-to-ground connections, Gogo Business Aviation’s new Business Operations Center (formerly the Network Operations Center) is at the core of a more than 30-year commitment to delivering the best in-flight connectivity experience possible.

It’s a sign of the times when a CEO has his chief pilot charter an airplane because the company jet’s internet system is down. Unfortunately, that happens a lot more often than you might think. And no connectivity means no flying.

Eliminating that added hassle from a busy chief pilot’s to-do list is one reason why Gogo Business Aviation has invested a lot of time, money, and effort into opening its state-of-the-5G-art Business Operations Center (BOC) in Colorado.

“Our customers expect their aircraft’s connection to work every time,” says Mike Schnepf, the company’s VP of Network Engineering. “They’re paying for the best and expect the best experience. Gogo has always been about delivering the best, and we have built the network to do that.”

“Our new BOC in Colorado is backed up by another operations center in the Midwest,” he continues. “The two facilities form a safety net for our service and support capabilities, and it’s all seamless to our customers. They just enjoy Gogo’s high-speed, low-latency air-to-ground connectivity.”

Of course, having the most advanced technology is just part of the process. You also need the right people with the right skills and expertise to make it all work.

“The new Business Operations Center has been purpose-built in concert with our new 5G network,” explains Dave Glenn, Senior VP of Customer Operations. “It’s allowed us to bring together all our organizations under one roof so we can leverage all their knowledge to deliver the best customer experience. Having all that technical expertise in one place is a great benefit for our customers.”

Keeping bad things from happening to good networks

Air-to-ground (ATG) internet connections are complex with ground-based networks, ground-based antennas, servers, switches, power sources—well, a bunch of stuff. And even a small glitch among any of those network components can cause issues with your in-cabin internet experience.

Glenn explains that spotting and correcting said glitches before they become problems is one of the biggest benefits of having such diverse skillsets centralized at Gogo’s Business Operations Center.

“The best option is not to have something break in the first place,” he says. “But it can happen and when it does, the next best thing is to be able to tell the customer they had an issue, but we fixed it before it impacted their service. And if it is something we can’t fix remotely, we have the information to guide the operator through the fix as quickly as possible.”

“All of our network components from the aircraft to the antennas to the servers work together to create a big data source for our staff to watch and maintain,” Schnepf adds. “We’re using the latest in technologies and capabilities with the primary goal of ensuring that our customers stay connected in their aircraft.”

And when Schnepf says “staying connected,” he means they can enjoy any online experience in the airplane that they enjoy on the ground.

5G will be fast

How fast, you ask? Well, according to the company, Gogo’s new 5G network will routinely deliver ~25 Mbps on average, with peak speeds in the ~75-80 Mbps range. Just the speeds it needs to keep today’s capacity-craving customers happy.

“Two-thirds of our market are people who have grown up on being connected 24/7,” explains Sergio Aguirre, Gogo’s President and COO. “Millennial and Gen X passengers aren’t patient. They want the same experience in the air as they get on the ground.

“Our new AVANCE 5G platform will enable operators to upgrade the aircraft’s connectivity to deliver the speeds and streaming capabilities that keep pace with what our customers demand,” he adds.

Aguirre says that with Gogo’s AVANCE L5, you can stream Microsoft Teams or Zoom to multiple users in the cabin, or operators can use the Gogo DASH application to deliver a unique experience to different personnel on the aircraft, ensuring a great connectivity experience for everyone onboard.

“We can deliver the capacity the passengers want without worry about how much data they use,” he says. “And the capability will continue to grow, especially with 5G. The crew can have a dedicated SSID [Service Set Identifier], while the cabin has multiple SSIDs to use in many ways.”

Aguirre goes on to explain that the system’s upgradability is rooted in Gogo Business Aviation’s status as the only ATG provider that has developed and produced all of its software and components to the latest 3GPP protocols for 5G performance.

“Some customers have our ATG service, some have satellite access, and some may have only in-cabin streaming using Gogo Vision,” he continues. “With AVANCE, operators have the ability to choose the best network available to give each user onboard the best experience.”

Gogo goes global with LEO satellite connectivity

Speed, capacity, reliability, and flexibility are all hallmarks of Gogo Business Aviation and its growing array of services. Yet, while the network’s speed gets all the attention, none of it would be possible without the Business Operations Centers.

“From the aircraft’s LRUs to the antennas and operations center, we’ve built our entire network to deliver what others can’t,” Glenn says. “We’ve built it all to be redundant and reliable. And we’ve built our components to be flexible and easy to upgrade as our capabilities continue to grow.”

Just how easy? Well, for example, in late 2020, when the company wanted to lower the floor of its AVANCE service area from the standard 10,000 feet to a much more customer-friendly 3,000 feet, all it had to do was to “flip a switch” at the network level.

“The network relayed the upgrade to all the AVANCE LRUs, and the customers enjoyed a seamless upgrade without doing a thing,” Glenn explains. “Lowering the service altitude to 3,000 feet is a tremendous advantage in terms of how much more time during each flight our customers will benefit from their Gogo connections.”

Glenn also says that Gogo Business Aviation’s operations centers have not only been created to meet the current needs of the 4G and 5G ATG systems but to provide the same services as the company rolls out its recently announced Low Earth Orbit [LEO] satellite broadband service. That’s right: Gogo’s going global.

“We are an in-flight connectivity provider—not just an air-to-ground connectivity provider,” he continues. “Gogo Business Aviation’s number-one goal has always been to do what it takes to meet the customers’ needs and expectations, and we’re never complacent – always striving to add to our portfolio to provide the best customer experience possible. The investment to build our new operations centers is at the center of that commitment, now and well into the future.”