APEX Direct With Inmarsat’s Leo Mondale
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Welcome to our conversation series, APEX Direct, where prominent members of APEX share their opinion on some of the more pressing issues in our industry.
Leo Mondale joined Inmarsat in 2004 as vice-president of Business Development and Strategy and now serves as president of the communications company’s aviation business unit. In his time with the company, Leo founded and led the Growth Management and Support division, which included responsibility for product and service development, program management, the development of the Global Xpress program and overseeing the establishment of commercial aviation as a specific line of Inmarsat business. Prior to joining Inmarsat, he held a variety of senior positions in the satellite and aerospace industries, including at Iridium, Inc.
As Inmarsat’s Global Xpress program readies for its full launch, Leo Mondale, president, Inmarsat Aviation, weighs in on how the connectivity market is taking shape, common misconceptions about it and Inmarsat’s future outlook.
I think the market has now changed from connectivity on airplanes being speculative to something that’s happening. It is pretty well-established that nearly every airline now has some kind of plan for connectivity. So with that in mind, the players who are in there, who aren’t well-positioned with what they have today, are trying to get people to wait, and that motivates them to promise the moon three years from now.
I don’t think that the market pressure is going to allow airlines to wait. There are enough airlines in cities so that on competitive routes in competitive city pairs, if all the airlines don’t adopt in-flight Wi-Fi – which they typically do with lie-flat seats, and other upgrades that we’ve seen to the passenger experience over the last decade – they’re at a competitive disadvantage. It shifts market share on city pairs, and city pairs is how airlines make money. I think that waiting three or four years for something that may not be new and better, or that may not be deployed in that time frame, is not something the airline industry can or will do. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
I don’t think that the market pressure is going to allow airlines to wait.
There will always be room for improvement. Nobody sees this as a finite, one-time thing – us least of all, and we’re not trying to make a one-time technology sale to airlines. We’re trying to be a partner that will keep them current with the broader telecommunications and broadband market. There’s always going to be opportunities and new technologies introduced, but as far as waiting for those, I think that’s what’s creating all the traffic in the market.
I think the biggest misconception being perpetrated right now is that somebody knows how to create a system where tomorrow, everyone on every airplane can stream whatever they want. That is simply not doable. And I know that people qualify that statement, but they leave others with that belief. I find it troublesome that serious players in this market think that they should try to mislead people that way.
The challenge for a network operator is the hub. It’s not the spokes – the spokes are relatively easy; you only have a small number of airplanes. Where you see a huge concentration of passengers, during the early and mid-business day typically, that’s where the demands on a telecom network, as on an airline network, are going to be, by far, the highest. It’s the multiple orbit locations and facilities that can point at the same hub that will allow us to meet that requirement. It’s very, very hard – if not impossible – to beam from the same location like many of our competitors are trying to do.
It’s very, very hard – if not impossible – to beam from the same location like many of our competitors are trying to do.
Airlines are network experts, but they’re airline network experts, they’re not telecommunications experts. So it’s a little disingenuous to come out and say everyone can stream all the time. That’s just not credible. There are conditions attached to that, and people should talk about that openly. The airline industry is full of professionals who don’t want to promise something to their passengers that cannot be fulfilled.
I’m excited by the prospects of streaming and we’ll support streaming, but it’s not going to be every passenger on every airplane on day one. Let’s not exaggerate. Let’s move toward a future that includes streaming as part of a mix of other connectivity systems, and let’s give streaming to the airlines that want it, which aren’t all of them. I think we’d be better off setting expectations that are realistic, and I think the hyperboles around the streaming promises right now are probably misleading people more than anything.