Interview: The Future of Truly High-Speed In-Flight Wi-Fi

In-flight Wi-Fi has been, to put it frankly, stuck at the boarding gate during the past five years and even when it was cleared to board, it often felt like it never made it to the aircraft cabin. Telling investors and analysts during the company's third quarter earnings call on Friday, Global Eagle Entertainment CEO Dave Davis said "more than 200 megabits per second is easily [achievable for our in-flight Wi-Fi]," referring to the company's agreement with Hughes to utilize the Jupiter HT Aero Modem on its Airconnect antenna system. "Ku-band systems offer worldwide coverage, satellite redundancy and have the ability to cover 99% plus of all flight routes in the world," said Davis. "It’s difficult to say that the addition of the modem will take the speed from X to Y, because there are many other variables." "We expect the new modems to be available in the months ahead, this isn’t something that’s a year away. And it’s completely plug and play retrofittable with our current modem i.e. same socket and it just plugs in. And we would look to retrofit existing [carriers] based on discussions with those [carriers] and whether they’re interested in doing it or not." Global Eagle is one of the world's largest airline content providers, servicing 150 global airlines and on-boarding 20 new carriers this year, including Copa, Avianca, and Turkish Airlines. It's also a content provider for all airlines in the Etihad Group, and recently signed advertising and sponsorship agreements with two major U.S. airlines, including in-flight advertising with American Airlines. "We’re adding resources to our ad sales efforts internationally with a particular focus on European and Middle Eastern carriers, where Etihad and Flydubai are both major advertising sales customers of ours," said Davis during the call. "And we’re likely not done with [merger and acquisitions] going forward and we still have strong interest in adjacencies, which maritime is one of them. So the acquisitions we made or definitely have right down the alley was what we’ve been planning and acquisitions that broaden us horizontally are of interest to us as well." Skift recently sat down with Davis and Elias Zaccack, SVP and Head of Mobility for SES, to talk about how both companies are expanding their partnership with a multi-year, multi-transponder agreement, doubling Global Eagle's SES satellite capacity for in-flight Wi-Fi. We discussed what satellites mean for the future of