Honeywell’s Ground Game Reduces SATCOM Latency

Two or three seconds is forever in internet time, especially when you’re flying on the company jet. Whether you’re teleconferencing with an important client, live-streaming the shareholder meeting or watching the big game, nothing is more disrupting – and annoying – than a multi-second lag in your connection.

The enemy is latency, which is the amount of time it takes for a signal to travel from your laptop or personal device to a remote server and back again. From your office or couch, over a fiber optic link or copper cable, that can be pretty quick. Depending on various factors, it may take around 25 milliseconds – or about 0.025 seconds – and isn’t going to be noticeable.

But it takes longer when the signal needs to travel from your airplane seat to a Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite orbiting at 35,786 kilometers (22,236 miles), back down and through a point of presence (POP) and ground station, back up to the satellite and on to the airplane. Latency for SATCOM systems will always be greater, because even data traveling at the speed of light can’t overcome the main limiting factor: distance.

But all is not lost. You don’t have to fly point-to-point experiencing annoying delays, rotating hourglasses or talking over your friends and colleagues on video calls. Not while the connectivity experts at Honeywell Forge Airtime Services are on the job.

True, we can’t do anything about the laws of physics. But, to borrow a term from American football, we can optimize our “ground game” to deliver a better, faster, more reliable and more secure experience – with industry-leading latency.

Compared to other providers who may offer a single ground location, we have created an expansive global network with points of presence at four sites in North America, Europe and Australia. This creates a better experience for our customers by providing redundancy, enhancing security and reducing latency.

Multiple POPs, each with two hardware stacks, provide redundancy to ensure the network is always operational without the single-point-of-failure that may exist with a one-POP configuration.  Cybersecurity is built into the Honeywell Forge Airtime Services network, which meets the most stringent industry standards and adheres to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) security framework. We don’t charge extra for cybersecurity protection; it’s part of our basic offering.

We reduce latency by as much as 25% using our four dispersed POPs to decrease the distance the signal needs to travel. That’s a big enough difference to noticeably improve the user experience for cabin passengers.

For more information on how Honeywell can help reduce latency and improve your cabin connectivity experience, reach out to your Honeywell representative.