Latest / The Future Travel Experience (FTE) Podcast / Beaming you the best Wi-Fi in the Sky with Don Buchman, President of Viasat

Transcript

Beaming you the best Wi-Fi in the Sky with Don Buchman, President of Viasat · The Future Travel Experience (FTE) Podcast

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Ever felt like the world is moving too fast, that there's simply not enough time between clearing your inbox and joining the next team's call to give deep and meaningful thought to the technologies that are about to transform your aviation operation?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, help is at hand with this new future travel experience podcast.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Proud to be part of the Apex family.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Max Cosny.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Tune in for a collaborative and friendly forum where we'll guide you on the innovations that are too important to ignore.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: In each episode, I'll be interviewing aviation chiefs who've blazed a trail with new technology.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: You can listen on your way to work while traveling to an Apex FT event, or even while walking your dog.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever your preference, you'll uncover a wealth of collaboration, best practice, and creative thinking that you enjoy.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, listeners, and welcome to this week's show, which is most definitely out of this world.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: As I catch up with Don De Buckman, the president of Viasat and Apex board member, on how ViaSat's satellite technology is helping the company along on its mission to deliver the best Wi-Fi in the sky.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: How do you pinpoint high-speed connectivity to a small metal tube moving at over 500 miles an hour from an even smaller piece of metal many thousands of miles above that's moving even faster?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's all about the math, as Don teaches me, but it adds up to some impressive service development opportunities with airline partners that could just be a multiplier for in-flight passenger experiences.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, Don.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning to you.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh joining us from San Diego this morning.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the podcast.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thanks, Max.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to have you on.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I just want to start off by asking you, Don, what are some of the technological challenges in delivering high-speed, reliable Wi-Fi to aircraft, which I believe, but go on to educate me, is something that you lead on with your satellite technology.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we do, yeah.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, there's you're kind of the the first, if you go back in the industry, kind of the first thing was just, you know, you're flying on an airplane at 500 miles per hour, doing all the banking and you know, all the technical things of being on an airplane, right, on the ground in say Phoenix or Dubai, you know, in the middle of summer.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite, you know, quite hot.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get up to 40,000 feet, it's quite cold, you know, minus, you know, you're going from plus 70 degrees Celsius, sometimes, you know, at the worst, you know, spots and minus 55 Celsius, you know, it could be quite an environment.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: So there's just a technical challenge of the equipment.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then you know, pointing at a satellite, you know, as you're whizzing by 500 miles per hour, trying to keep, you know, pointed at a satellite, you know, that's 40,000 kilometers away, is you know, those are but those are problems that were solved, right?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: These are technical problems that were solved.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would say for in-flight Wi-Fi, then the fundamental hardest problem to solve is it's demand, it's it's supply and demand, right?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: You you're you're delivering capacity.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of people on a plane, they tend to congregate around, you know, there's a lot of people on a single plane, a lot of planes are on airports, busy corridors.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So making sure that anyone who wants to be online and get data can get it, right?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's having enough capacity where it's being commanded at.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the that's been the number one uh buggy boo for the industry since we've kind of started 20 some years ago, is just running out.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the biggest, the biggest failure mode had been wasn't any of the technical stuff, it was just it was more demand than supply.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, just going back like 38,000 feet, something going 500 miles an hour.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know the length of an aircraft, but already the mass is starting to blow my mind.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, it sounds like a heck of an equation trying to work out how you pinpoint something going however many thousands of miles an hour around the earth, uh whatever the altitude is, to get that service back.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there must be some sophisticated calculations going on with you guys.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean it's it's yeah, I like to say it's just math.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it sounds so easy, done.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just fun, it's fun engineering problems, right?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, the but the industry solved them 25 years ago, right?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: The kind of the first satellite-based communications, you know, were what we'll call you know, small L-band uh satellites that had you know broader beams, so you'd have to be very accurate.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: But you were tracking them, you know, into the you know, 80s, 70s and 80s, and then you got the advent of television, right?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: So television being you know, live television being delivered via satellite um to homes happened, and then that you know translated to the aircraft, and that was one of the first uses.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then you got into what's called two-way communications, which was the internet, you know, and that started, you know, really started in the early 2000s, late, you know, connection by Boeing was one of the first ones to do that in the late 90s, um, at high speed, right?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: We've been doing L band, which was kind of lower speed earlier, two-way, and then but kind of the true internet started kind of around 2000 with Connection by Boeing.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, these are you know, these were you know, they're hard problems at the time.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're still hard problems you have to be mindful of, you know, but they're from an engineering standpoint, you know, they were, you know, those those aren't the those aren't the tough problems anymore.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: What what are the tough problems, would you say in 2026 then for for the industry?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um Yeah, it's it's keeping up, right?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just look at what you know, it's just the explosion of the internet, right?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: In the last you know, we think of the internet, you know, kind of had its heyday and you know, the dot-com boom, you know, in the 99, 2000, then it kind of went away, then you know, sort of, you know, kind of kind of came back in its current form.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, then it you know started off as just you know, checking sports scores, buy stock scores, could do an email, you know, getting it's more information grabbing, then it became entertainment.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of quickly translated to entertainment, and that was kind of the next era.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And entertainment really brought in high bandwidth demand, right?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to watch, I'm watching my movie, someone else is watching her TV show, somebody else is watching a live sports match, um, on and on and on, or you're watching YouTube.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you just had you know, that was a lot of demand at the same time coming through.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it was just basically making sure you had a connectivity uh conduit that that could keep up with all that demand.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you run out, it's congestion, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's sitting on the freeway at rush hour.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I know I can go 80 miles per hour, but I can't because I'm sitting here in traffic going at you know one mile per hour.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's the same thing when you know when you have congestion on the internet.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I know I can watch this movie, but there's not enough bandwidth, so I can't, you know, I can't get a web page to load, my email to send, movie to play.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a hard thing.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, where are we at, Don, we're meeting that bandwidth challenge on an aircraft as we were discussing, it's going 500 miles an hour, 38,000 feet.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: And there might be 300, 400 plus people.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: One wants to stream a live sports match, another's watching uh movie, someone's updating their social media.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's that's a heck of a demand for a moving object.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it is, and that's what I mean.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the industry has been investing, right?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, your bias has been one of the players, like so.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: What we invested in, we we sort of saw this coming a long time ago, right?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: We've been investing in sort of you know, you sort of you make a bet.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Will there be demand for more data or less data?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we sort of sided on the bet of more, you know, there can be more data.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then what's and then then then it's the technical solutions of how do you solve those problems, right?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there's multiples that are in there, but it's part of it is just having enough bandwidth.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a technical thing of just delivering enough bandwidth to a physical location, you know.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe it's a hundred airplanes around Hartsfield International and Atlanta, you know, maybe it's 200 airplanes around you know, Heathrow and London, Gatwick and you know, Lou and all those planes.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: So just making sure when you have all that demand, you have enough, you're able to generate enough capacity in that region.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then the other piece of it is it has to be economical.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you could do that, but if the economics don't work and it's not affordable, you know, then your sort of willingness to pay, you've exceeded your willingness to pay.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's the that's the fine line that the industry's been going after.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a combination of having a lot of capacity in the right spots so you can meet the demand, also having what's what's called unit economics, such that I can deliver the bandwidth at appropriate enough prices that the airline or the passenger is willing to pay, you know, for that service.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, explain to me the complete novice on how you achieve that.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: So, how many satellites um have you got up there to provide this service?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's interesting.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of where the industry is sort of taken.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's a couple different approaches.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: So Biasat has been, we've we've sort of taken the the tact of what's called there's called geo, there's three different satellite types.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's orbits there's called what's geosynchronous, which is those are satellites that kind of are fixed at the same spot in the earth all the time.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're ground, you can have a fixed antenna, it always points to the same point in space.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: It stays there.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're a little bit further away.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Those have the advantage of they're always over the same spot on the earth, and so you can then direct your energy appropriately, you know, where you want it there.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's always over, you know, say the Western Hemisphere, Eastern Hemisphere, um, and you can sort of dictate that.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's what's called uh uh MIO, which is uh mid-Earth orbit, and then LEO, low earth orbit, and those two orbits rotate at a different rate than the Earth rotates.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you have so the satellites aren't always overhead.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: So then you have to have where we can have one satellite over, say, Europe and have enough bandwidth to have one satellite to cover it, with MIOS and Leos, you may need tens to twenties to hundreds to thousands to always have a satellite that's overhead in view that has capacity, you know, so there's so those are just two different philosophies of you know delivering.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: But from what you described, there's a lot of satellites up there, uh well above miles and miles above our heads as we talk, but there's an awful lot in low Earth orbit and mid-Earth orbit.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's in Geo in general, there's probably a couple hundred geosatellites, you know, in there because it's like every two degrees kind of around, say around 360 degrees.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Scott just said 23 in service.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: 22 in satellite.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: So we've we've uh yeah, so we have we have you know that many.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's you know, a lot of others have geosynchronous, you know, satellites.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was fairly the it was kind of the standard bearer for satellite communications, starting you know, when the satellite industry kind of got out.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And with the Leos, now they're up to you know, the constellations are probably in uh almost close to 10,000 satellites, if you sort of look at all of the all the Leos that are put up.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, so each each has its own attribute.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it takes a lot of satellites for Leo to get density in any one area.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the the good side is they're low, lower to they're lower to Earth and they have what's called latency.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: They're kind of the the signal doesn't travel as far in time.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that'll lend itself to um you know lower what's what's called snappiness.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's you know, there's there's multiple ways.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's a few applications uh that are that like gaming, for instance, like that are you know very sensitive to like you know, first shooters shoot-up gaming systems that'd be more sensitive to very low latency.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: But even the Leos it's not as you know, there's you know, even that latency is not going to gauge into international gaming competitions, you know, you know, they're you know, fiber on the trust trail, you know, they're talking, you know, net you know, milliseconds, you know, single milliseconds kind of latencies versus you know tens and hundreds of milliseconds.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: How long will those satellites be useful?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: How what's the lifespan?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's kind of you know, so that's also design constraint, right?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we, you know, the the geos typically are rated for 15 years for service, and typically you'll get you know 18 to 20 is kind of like an if you get sort of nominal nominal life out of all the different systems.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: The LEO systems now vary from provider, but they're typically rated for five years.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so every you know, so every five years you have satellites that are being decommissioned and need to be deorbited, and they kind of burn back up into the Earth's atmosphere, and you have to launch more, right?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a there's a sustaining component to it.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: So like just to maintain my network, I have to you know, re keep replenishing on at least a five-year, you know, every satellite on a five-year schedule.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have you know thousands of them, you can imagine every year, you know, you have a lot of there.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: So again, these are just different, there's different ways of approaching the same problem, um, you know, of what we talked about to start with.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's a fascinating term you use there around deorbiting.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you so after the five years, do you just allow the satellite to naturally decelerate and come down, or you actively slow it down and it burns up and re-enters the Earth's atmosphere?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you yeah, the way it works is like for Geo, what happens is we we put ours in what's called a parking orbit, or uh, so you basically it goes above the orbit.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: You basically have a little bit of fuel, you raise its orbit, and so it gets out of the way, and it's kind of now floating in space, um, outside of the you know the all the orbits.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um with Leo, what happens?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: They they can't do that.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's no like orbit above it to kind of park for life.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: So they what they do is they have fuel burn to then lower the orbit, and then the atmospheric drag of the Earth's atmosphere will then bring it back down to Earth, and during that drag, it creates heat, which is essentially disintegrates it, but yes, all that material just gets burnt up in the atmosphere.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic stuff.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: And Don, I I want to um sort of paint the picture for the the listeners here.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: But at the end of the uh strategic board meeting where we were together for Apex at Addis Ababa, at the end of the first day, we'd had a really intense day of business, got through a lot, and you said um guys, we're about to launch uh one of the satellites.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Let's I can show you the live footage from the launch pad.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and we proceeded to watch what is still I can't still can't get my head around this.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: It was unbelievable uh what you guys achieved there.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we watched um one of the satellites being launched up on a rocket unit.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but the most incredible thing, again, to uh perhaps a non-engineer like me was the intention was not only to launch this satellite but to return the the rocket uh system back to the launch pad for reuse.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you I mean it's just I can't get my head around this, but you managed to return this um system from however many um thousand feet miles above the uh the the Earth's atmosphere into the into space essentially, but back down to and it's had a retro rocket thrust right at the end and dropped it to the nearest centimeter, you know, on the launch pad.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I turned to you and I think at the time I said, How do you do that?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you said it's just mass, but that's some extraordinary mass.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a it's a yeah, the so the industry is really you know the the launch industry was you know one of the things was you have you know what are the big what are the things that go into launch?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh you know, you have to have a size constraint, right?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: You have enough fuel, right?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have a fuel to get you know, sort of force to get you know whatever payload, the you know the satellite's the payload, right?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: So whatever whatever lift you want to get up to whatever orbit, so that requires a fuel burn.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: So fuel's very expensive, right?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: That goes away.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then and when you weren't launching very often, you would just expend those those rocket, what they're called, the uh the boosters.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: So they're what would hold all the fuel, and you would just sort of let those go.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it was cheaper to let those go because I wasn't launching very often, and then just build a new one and you know for the next launch.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: The the latest launches um that the companies are doing is you know, they've gotten into what's called reusable.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so the so what the you know, what it was was was what's more expensive, the metal and the manufacturing of that or the fuel.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out it's actually a better to reuse everything.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: It allows you to get a faster launch cadence.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you have the expense of a little bit more fuel burn, but what you're getting back is I don't have to remanufacture you know that entire metal booster structure.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so they've been doing this you know for five, seven, you know, eight years now.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's been it is perfected now.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: All the launch, all the launch capabilities are now getting a reusability.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really it's it helps the economics, so it allows you to launch faster.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it helps the economics, so the launch doesn't cost as much, and you can do it at a much faster cadence.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of it used to be launches used to be like, you know, six to ten a year from each of the launch providers, now they're doing hundreds a year.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so that that cadence, yeah.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then just the math is just, you know, it's you know, you basically it's a you have to manage the fuel.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: You have to, you know, you want to minimize the fuel on board because that's kind of wasteful to come back.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to minimize that, but have just enough control to land in that exact spot.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, it's a it's a really cool problem.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: As a business, uh Viceat, you describe yourself as a leading global technology company, and your DNA is built on that kind of pioneering innovation we're describing there.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: But how do you translate that into everyday employee action?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's you know, it's it's kind of inspiring the mission, right?
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: So what we've always, you know, Bice as a company, we were coming up on our 40th anniversary, um, and it's always been around, you know, it's kind of it was founded by engineers.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, our CEO and chairman of the board, Mark Dinkberg and Mark Miller are still very involved.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Steve Hart, our three founders, still very involved, all engineers.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really, you know, trying to find they they're trying to find that intersection of really hard engineering problems to solve.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the business and the business mission of those produced a good business result, right?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: There was a reason to do it.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was kind of the intersection.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't want to just do everything ever someone else was doing and just, you know, you know, it was, you know, basically how how cheap can I do it, right?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to compete on that.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was competing on finding really hard problems to solve and finding, you know, business needs that those translate.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's always been the mission, and all the things that BIS has done.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been at the company 27 years now, going on 28, and it's uh that's what's kept me inspired.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I've kind of personalized it.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm inspired, then I think everyone else around me should be inspired.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: We kind of hire people that DNA.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really, it's really kind of taken that kind of mission and translating it into very customer-centric and business outcome.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, the hard problem, like you just we just talked about how hard it was to get you know, getting you know, in-fly Wi-Fi into a plane and doing that at scale, you know, across over 4,000 airplanes globally.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the mission.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's and that's also a really technical hard problem.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so you kind of break it down to that and you sort of break it down into you know business metrics, right?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, we have to have good business, right?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: We we're not, you know, we you know, do it such that we're we're solving it.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's a willingness to pay that you're you're generating, hey, I've generated a product that if I solve it and I get it in the market the right way, people are gonna use it and they're gonna value it, you know, by paying for it in a sustained way.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the that's the business outcome.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the and then the mid and the technical outcome is yeah, we if we do this, it's really hard for others to do it, right?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: They they can't, you know, we don't own it, but it's a really hard problem.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: So not everyone's you know, not everyone's gonna go after it.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's worth solving.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we've got some technical expertise.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: We can sort of apply that in this method, and it's got you know good good sustaining business.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's we always kind of translate those kind of two intersections kind of back down to everything we do.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, every metric we track, every outcome, every customer success.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: And having a cool head and that innate ability to problem solve would seem, as evidenced by you, a real um key attribute to be a success at Biosat.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you select for that um and look out for particularly, I guess, newer members of the team who who demonstrate they've got that kind of knack for solving problems?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, you know, so you know, kind of engineers by you know, kind of by design and economists and you know, anyone, any kind of person who sort of has that same DNA of problem solving, right?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's tend to be trained for, trained for.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we, you know, it's tends to be the you know, cream rises at the top.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so it tends to be self-selecting.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you have hard problems, hard missions, it's not for everybody.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Some somebody wanna, I want to know exactly what I'm doing for the next 10 years.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Some people are kind of wired that way.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: We, you know, we tend to hire for sort of that, you know, there's a bit of vagueness, a little bit of uncertainty.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't know exactly what the right answer is or what the problem to solve is, you know, we're you know, part of the journey is not solving a problem, it's discovering what is the right problem to solve.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, and that's as hard of that's as hard of a thing sometimes to do is then solving it itself is figuring out what is the right thing to solve and how to spend your energy.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I you know, we've tended to attract people in that realm.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think it's you know, it's it's something that you don't study for, it's just sort of in, you know, as you can sort of see in people's eyes and actions.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, it's it just it just sort of happens, and you know, we built up a great team uh over the years.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, our team is just fantastic and it's been longstanding.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, one of the prides is you know how low turnover we have.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we you know everyone joins a team and you know the you know stays and just it keeps enjoying the mission.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: So what would be your typical length of service at the start?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean we've been I mean, I would our our team, we have everyone that's been here from 30, 30 plus years, you know, to brand new hires.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, as a team's grown, right?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: We've you know grown from a couple of us that just you know had a crazy idea and tried to figure this out 20 years ago, you know, it was four or five of us, and you know, that you know the team is you know broader by a set, you know, it's a very large amount of people are supporting aviation and then the core team.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's you know, it's it's but it's it's good to have mix.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not just you don't want to have kind of group think and have everything that's this way we did it 20 years ago, so that's how we're gonna do it.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we've been, you know, we have a good mix of long-tenued, mid-tenued, and I see brand new people, and that that energy and that mix kind of really drives you.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be fascinated to know, uh, Don, your own observations of the in-flight experience as a passenger.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what do you enjoy and also what what frustrates you while on board?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um well so yeah, what frustrates me is I you know I want everything to be perfect and you know it's a hard problem to solve.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: So what I do is, you know, so when I when I get on, um, and again, I'm very I can be an engineer, so I I tend to be a tester, you know, so I'm I'm walking through everything.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very hypercritical of every moment of everything.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, then I walk around.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I observe.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: I like to see what people are doing.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it really is, you know, you really know, because you aren't through, you're not telling people what to do, you're allowing them to do what they want to do, right?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not a curated experience.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and my frustration with kind of the way the industry started off was it was kind of a curated experience.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was just trying to adapt the experience to what I can deliver.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And our mindset had always been, well, I don't need to curate it.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's the internet.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: People are going to do what they want to do in a coffee shop at home on a plane.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to kind of naturally gravitate to what they're doing.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's what we've seen.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what's been exciting.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I, you know, I do a mix, you know, I do a lot of business on the planes.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: It also is entertainment.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so a big thing is, you know, driving entertainment.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's you know, just like your living room isn't delivered by you know a dedicated, you know, cable television, and you know, more of the more likely it's you know, now you're just kind of being delivered by an internet by and you're watching it, you know, your your TV's entertainment device, just like your phone is when you're on a train or at a coffee shop or in a hotel, and then your laptop.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: So all these devices have kind of become interchangeable.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's you know, the mixing of multiple screens, business, you know, doing your business applications, uh, doing your you know, planning for home and doing your your your communications, you know, whether it be text, social media, and then you know entertainment.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Howdy there, partners.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Future Travel Experience's 20th anniversary global is going to Texas.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: Join us from the 8th to the 10th of September in Dallas, where we'll be bringing together airlines, airports, technologists, startups, and industry partners who wish to reimagine the future of travel.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: For attendance inquiries or to join us on the exhibition floor, please email me at max at future travel experience.com.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see you there.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Gordon, you're on board and the Wi-Fi signal drops out.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: What's your first thought?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: My first thought, well, if it's on our plane and like, you know, what's what's going on?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I basically dig in.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I turn into a field engineer.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if it's you know something I'm on um and I kind of know what's going on.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I you know, we always want this, right?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is the thing we want.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: We want 100% perfection.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: So every outage is treated as a disaster, you know.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got to make sure that you've got that.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: And an outage could be that it'sn't enough capacity, or for whatever reason the signal was lost.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so you basically want to make sure that we we understand why you always want to get the root cause of what happened why and how quickly can you fix it.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: So uh even when you're traveling for leisure, I imagine you'll never able to switch off uh because that scenario makes you think about satellite.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean life is life, right?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see I don't switch on or off, right?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at work, I'm at home, I'm flying.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, that's to me, I'm kind of always done.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't really switch off one to the other.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, you know, it's just life.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you recently joined Apex as a board member.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, tell us about that opportunity and what you think are the big priorities for the association um in enhancing the passenger experience and addressing some of these issues around Wi-Fi and in-flight experiences.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I think that's you know, it's it's a big opportunity across the board, right?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: What I really like about the industry, you know, the Apex and the you know in the industry and the constituents is you really have everyone is dedicated to that same mission.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, the airlines, you know, we're all in it together.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: The airlines, because you know, they're they're in business to, you know, they're basically transporting people, right?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then you know they're on airplanes, and you know, while they're on there, they want to enhance the passenger experience through a lot of different amenities.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: It may be the seat, then maybe you know the quality of the food, it may be the quality of the coffee, um, it may be the you know, the process of checking in, um, the brand.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then more and more, it's become this digital experience, whether it be the entertainment, the seat, you know, the screens and the seatback, which has been tremendous, you know, getting the latest, you know, Bollywood or Hollywood movies, you know, on board or TV shows, you know, connecting streamers, and then the digital now, you know, basically allowing the user to have more control from them for themselves, whether it be through the airline app, uh, through the um, you know, how they interact with, say, that seatback screen or the airline, or just allowing them to basically use, you know, basically use their devices how they would anywhere else, whether it be at home or work in a coffee shop.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: I like to use coffee shop as my is my ground-based, you know, third, uh, third, third place or third location uh is there.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that's and so you know, kind of coming together, would be the industry x that you know, the the the the entertainment industry, you know, that's basically promoting, you know, because they've been living through a uh transformation in their own world, right?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: The you know it used to be you know delivery big movies into a movie screen, you know, into a movie house, and then you know, the movie house then transferred to uh you know a videotape or a DVD and you know, that whole you know, streaming has really changed that you know, production roadmap and so entertainment guys, you know, are you still in the business of entertaining, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: So whether you're in a seat or in a movie or at home, still in the business and they want that product out.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're adapting with the times.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think what the what really excites me is this kind of all of us, the technology providers, the entertainment providers, and the airlines themselves of curating this and basically coming together to make sure we as an industry have the you know least friction to basically allowing everyone to sort of deliver those experiences and adapt.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because one of the things you want to do is they want to have standards, you want to have ways of doing it such that it's not really hard for any one of the entities to to operate in their in the mission, right?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning if airline goes from provider A to B to C, whether it be uh entertainment, you know, or a seat or something else, they don't want to have to throw out everything they learn they they knew and then relearn it all again, right?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: They want to be able to quickly do that, and that's friction, right?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's just you know that that that that's unneeded energy spent to kind of solve the same problem.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the industry is really good at coming together of standards, allowing you know all these things to come together and kind of reducing that sort of you know parasitic you know drag on the industry of having a lot of stuff just to change, having standards we all operate over.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then you know, then then you can you know the airlines can then quickly get what's best for the the passengers and what the markets decide.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, thank you, Don.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um our brand is future travel experience.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: So how much of the future do you see taking uh shape in space and space tourism as a man who's helping launch uh your product into space?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the space tourism is you know, I think it gets everyone's fancy, but you know, I think the real mission is you know cargo to you know, cargo, right?
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there's you know, if you believe the science fiction, right, and it's it's happening, you know, you've got you know kind of this I want to colonize the moon, colonize Mars, right?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um then you know there's space tourism get a ride.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, lunar bases, right?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's the vision.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we've all watched the we've been watching science fiction for a long time, and you're seeing it play out, right?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, and there's a lot of you know big thinkers out there that are you know trying to do that.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that's you know, that's a long-term thing.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the space tourism piece is yeah, I personal Don's view is more like an inter, you know, it's more like a like a theme park, right?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: I get a ride, I get a 20-minute thrill ride, it's great, but you know, it's you know, it's still gonna be probably only for the super wealthy, you know, it's you know, because it's just a lot of, you know, I think the cost will, you know, the cost will have to come down tremendously, you know, to make it something that you know the average, you know, average folks will be, you know, be able to do the space tourism piece of it, right?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: But that that's the mission, though.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's what all the rocket companies, the all the governments, um, you know, all of the things of basically getting cargo into space cheaply.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you've heard of talk about data centers now and AI, all that mission is to basically drive, you know, drive higher demand and which will then allow you to invest in lower unit cost.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so all those things are good, right?
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: The more demand you have, which is kind of like what I talked about earlier with the internet, you know, you had to have a lot of demand to basically invest in unit low unit cost.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because if I if I built a terabit per second satellite, but I'm only able to sell 100 gigabits, that's you know, that's kind of wasteful.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's 900 going to waste, right?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: So those unit economics don't work.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: You need to have demand.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: So space tourism is the same as seeing the cargoes, right?
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why you have these missions, you know, to go to Mars, to have lunar bases, to have data centers, you need to have the demand there to drive the investments.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what you've been seeing um in the industry.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um possibly do you think the role is to bring some of that cargo back?
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking, you know, minerals, materials um from lunar base or from uh asteroids from being long talked about.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's like, is there an untapped resource out there, right?
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is there an energy source that's cleaner, more durable, you know, that we can that's mine, right?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Those are I think that's what you know a lot of our governments have been exploring, right?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, here in the US, NASA has been, you know, doing these missions to understand, you know, what is a you know, some asteroid will go by and what's the composite of it.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: Is there you know materials that are valuable, you know, that would be worth bringing back, you know, have an industry.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there is, yeah, I think that's part of the, I think that's part of the discovery part, right?
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is there gonna be something out there just you know, when people first started getting outside of, you know, and you know, you know, getting on the open oceans here on Earth, and right and they were you know found, you know, found riches in the foreign lands, and you know, so that's the same thing as that's the same same concept gonna play out in space.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Are we gonna be able to find you know resources that'll be useful in space or you know back here on Mother Earth?
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: FT Lunar Conference 2032.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: You heard it here first.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe the first one out of this world.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, book me as one of your speakers, although I don't see myself traveling in space, but yeah, it could be an expensive ticket up there, but we'll we'll we'll come to an agreement.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um bringing it back down to Earth, you are uh tell me more about how you're helping customers, um, airline customers develop those ancillary revenue streams on board through your technology.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's actually one of the really interesting, you know, interesting and exciting.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's kind of you know, bringing in the future travel experience as well.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of you know tying together all those threads.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And airplane's one of those, you know, is a node on those threads.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we, you know, one of the things that we've been doing a lot is, you know, we talked about the unit cost of economics.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so the airlines, one of the trends is the airline buys Wi-Fi from a rider like Biasat, and then they give it away for free to their customers, you know, and it's as a as a perk, just like they buy Coca-Cola or coffee and you know, give those away for free, you know, typically some airlines will charge, some don't.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, you also have the ultra-low cost carriers.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's an amenity that you get as part of your ticket.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so the airlines are always looking to, you know, they they can offset that cost by you know brand enhancement, um, you know, by providing you know better service, but there's also a sponsorship piece of it, right?
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: So they so brands will like to affiliate themselves with free Wi-Fi.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: So in the US, you've seen big brands, especially the mobile telcos like T-Mobile, AT ⁇ T, have been title sponsors, but we've also been um doing what's called you know ad-supported Wi-Fi.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you get on Wi-Fi, you know, you're we have brands that'll come in and you know you'll watch a 30-second video, you know, advertisement come in.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the simplest way as a gate into there, and you basically get, you know, you basically build up brand value for the advertiser.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they get their product displayed in front of a pretty good, a pretty good audience.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh, it's a pretty well-known audience that has a lot of uh valuable context.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they you know the demographics are you know which area, you know what they're flying, you know, what class they're flying in, they know you know which city pairs they're running to.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're generally, if you're flying, you can afford a ticket.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that kind of puts you into a certain demographic.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you can learn a lot just from the context of that.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And there's certain brands who want to you know go into that travel side of it.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really good that you kind of land on a thing, but it's also an there's also a really good marketing uh and kind of you know, customer capture is part of that.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you think of we had talked about entertainment, so you think of streamings, you know, streaming companies are trying to get subscribers, and so one of the best places to do when you're on your and you know if you're on an airplane, you want to, you know, it's one of the things you can think about is it's a good spot to get somebody to try a new entertainment product.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: So they get their entertainment like on the seatback screens.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great way of showing the content.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then if you you can also offer a free say so say one day, 30, 30 day subscription to a service, right?
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I basically, oh, I'm gonna go try this lady's streaming service, and I get a free thing, I can go to watch their content on a two one hour, two hour, ten hour flight.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the good thing about it is I can walk off of the product, meaning I try it and then I now have a subscription for one, two, thirty days.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can walk off of that product, get more used to it, and that's that'll help customer capture for a lot of these companies.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you kind of translate it to the whole future travel stream, then you can look at the whole, you know, you know, it's called, you know, um, what do they call it?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Booking to bellhop, right?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Is you know, I go in and I, you know, I I book my vacation trip and I book all the way through, you know, how to get to the airport, you know, whether it be you know through public transport, taxi, or uh rideshare service.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: I got my airport experience, you know, so I'm gonna basically there's a lot of retail happening in there.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: So whether it be retail or um or food and beverage in the airports, you're you're transiting an airport, right?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: So say I have a long haul flight, I'm transiting through Dallas.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I know that's happening, and you can the the airport can target that customer with the advertisement to give them, say, here's a 10% off you know coupon for the Nike store, and you know, you know, come visit us and sell all five.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that'll allow the airport to interact with a passenger at a really good point in time when they're transiting, you know, when they're in that mission, they're gonna be in the airport for an hour and a half.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's the golden hour, right?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that kind of that that that hour when you get through security or land and you haven't got to your next flight.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just a tremendous amount of taking all the retail opportunities, whether it be on the ground, the booking, the airports themselves, and then the you know, connecting in the transit piece on the airline together, you know, through the system.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really exciting.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it sounds from what you described, like it'll um that ancillary retailing will come much more responsive and sophisticated as as technology develops to bring stuff through to you live as you're transiting through the uh the aviation supply chain.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: We've been investing a lot in the advertising and sort of the tools behind it, and you know, and it's not just revise that we're helping, you know, it's a it's a tool on the ground that we can actually help anyone in this industry, you know, tap into.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really exciting opportunity.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: How did you first um become uh inspired by uh the world that you're in of aviation, satellite communications?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: What what's your story?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, so my story, so I'm an engineer, so I got my undergraduate degree in what's called aeronautical, astronautical engineering, and then I I went into industry and I was working um, you know, a lot of a lot of uh space programs.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then I went back and got my master's degree in communication systems, which is essentially, you know, you know, wireless communications.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was just kind of natural that I studied, you know, aeronautical, astronautical engineering and communications engineering, and I okay, put Wi-Fi on a plane, right?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: That seemed very natural.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, so my story was I'm you know, you know, pretty much a hardcore engineer developing signal, you know, doing signal processing.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I started off doing what was known as guidance navigation and control for spacecraft.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: That was my first job out of school.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then when I when I found my way to BISAT, I you know was part of a new modem program.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I designed, you know, I designed and developed a new kind of technology of a modem.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then that was right at the 1999.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then kind of that was right when this intersection started happening.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of go back to the ethos and DNA of Biasat, what's a hard problem and a good business outcome, right?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: That intersection.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time it became pretty obvious.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't sure how long it was going to take, but we knew it was gonna happen of being connected in flight.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so we, you know, sort of, I took sort of ground-based technologies and I found ways, you know, we we basically had some technologies on our shelf that we had developed for different purposes, but it turned out I could adapt them and solve some hard problems.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the first one we solved was on business jets.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: So here you have a Gulfstream bombardier, you also have an airplane that's very small, um, but it had a very high willingness to pay, right?
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: You had, you know, corporate, corporate business users flying around as very valuable time on that plane.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't really connected very well at the time, right?
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: They were getting like a 64 kilobit link.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this was in the 2000 time frame.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was the opportunity we saw.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I talked about the internet was coming online.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that was kind of the hey, there's an opportunity here.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's definitely a willingness to pay, you know, for that small segment.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really hard problem to solve.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: I have to get a really I have to get I got a communication with a really small antenna on a really small aircraft that's flying around the world.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and none of the technologies in satellite communications or antennas had been developed to solve that problem.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: You had to have what was the smallest antenna you could kind of reliably put on a satellite was one meter.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried to put it on 30 centimeters.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: I had to find, I had to, okay, one meter was the standard, I had to figure out a way to get it on the 30 centimeters.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that was where we kind of looked at our toolkit and we said, ah, here's a way of solving that problem.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we had this waveform, we had this spread spectrum technology we had developed for a different application.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: And um, someone else had done a tele had done a small antenna for watching television.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I was able to take those kind of three things, put it together, and create a two-way product.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that was kind of what launched our business into business jets, and that kind of got us going into the overall aeronautical, you know, kind of Wi-Fi.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then that got smart and we just sort of stayed with it.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: We started learning with the industry, started investing.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: We understood how you know the problems, how hard it was to, you know, operate over the technical spaces.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, we just built our team up and we just, you know, we were no no tolls would be hard, otherwise we wouldn't have done it.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we a little bit of uh a little bit of ignorance is bliss kind of approach, and every day was a new problem.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we, you know, our team, we just attracted people that liked that environment.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: And what will keep you coming back?
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: What will you get the biggest enjoyment from today and and tomorrow and the next day?
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's you know, I like to think of it as like every day I walk into the office, I'm un I'm unequipped to do the day's task.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're finding new ground.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're you know, I'd you know, we not only had to create a new business, you know, a new a new technology, then create a business model around it, then we had to adapt business models and finding ways to offer it into the marketplace.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so you were every day you were developing something new and trying to optimize for again the outcome.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: What's the outcome?
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: The passenger gets a reliable service at a at an affordable unit cost, right?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's the that was the mission, right?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: I need a I need to have connectivity product that does that at the low at the low and in economics.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's a thousand different ways of doing that.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: So every day we're doing it, and we have, you know, as we've known, as we knew this was an attractive market, it's attracted a lot of big players into it.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so the competition keeps you on your toes every day.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: So every day you can never kind of sit back at rest.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're every day, you're day one.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta you gotta keep competing, you gotta keep going.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you're you know, if you're not moving forward, you're falling behind.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what you're constantly keeping up with that.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then the internet changes, right?
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, when we started, Netflix was still was a company that was sending you know red envelopes with DVDs in it, you know, to people.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't even a streaming service.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: That that happened.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, then you had the advent of you know um social media, that happened, you know, Facebook and YouTube.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then now it's you know, now it's become more of a of a contribution market, meaning the TikToks of the world right now.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not only consuming data, I'm actually putting data up, right?
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the links have changed and the demands change, and that's all been the last you know 15, 20 years since we've gotten you know into business.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's it's it's really exciting.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, every day is new, every day is hard, every day is a challenge, and it's it's just fun to kind of walk in every day and try to figure that out.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Don, um as a closing question, um, a lot of the podcast focused is around innovation.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: Our audience um really interested in this topic of innovation.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: What's your tip around uncovering it and then making it stick?
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh you know, we it innovation is hard, right?
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's fun, but it's also just you're trying to you have to look for blind spots, right?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: You have to look for okay, what's what's what's going on?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: What's the innovative?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: What's a new dimension of value, right?
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: That someone wants to bring on, right?
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: So dimensions of value are things like what is I I value that attribute of a product more than something else.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, it's it doesn't necessarily need to be a one-for-one, it's everything's better.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's just one dimension's better, right?
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that was well for us, our our insight was we saw our our insight was when we started the business, it was internet on the airplanes was paid and slow.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I paid a lot of money for it and it didn't work very well.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone thought that was the market, right?
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, why would you enter that market?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's only six percent of people are willing to pay.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you're not gonna get generate that much demand or that much you know money out of it.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's you know, terrible.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, our insight was we thought everyone on a plane wanted to be connected.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, back then, you know, before you were connected, the first thing you do when you when you saw people land, the first thing they did when they got out was they pulled their phones out of their pockets and they checked what happened.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: They got out.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: That was the thing.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, okay, they want to be online, they just there was reasons they couldn't be online.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: So there was barriers to it.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: So then you look at what are the barriers, and that led us to the innovations, right?
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that was finding out what's the people want to be online, okay.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: Then what are the innovations I have to do to get them online?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then sort of what what are the right problems to solve?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so again, we we sort of took the tack, okay.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's what people want to be online.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: It has to have good unit, it has to have good cost to be online, so I have to have a lot of capacity and have to do it at low price.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that led to the innovations.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I need to drive satellite technologies that give me the you know the right capacity that you know that'll keep up there for the you know for the time and and give the good quality service and do it at an affordable price.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Don, it's been fascinating talking to you.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I wish you all the success with the many problems you're gonna solve today.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm very confident listening to you, you're gonna rise to the challenge.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you, Max.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was it was it was fun.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for having us on.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a pleasure.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: We've learned a lot.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Don, and have a great day.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, thank you.