From Net Surfing to Life-Saving Actions – An Overview of Air-to-Ground Solutions

The broadband data service is already available in the sky, no longer just serving air travellers but very soon the blue light emergency workers. Various A2G use cases define their own set of requirement attributes which in turn determines an optimal solution approach. Commercial airliners typically demand high-speed downlink service for passengers that operates at higher altitude and at higher airborne speed than the blue light aircrafts. The latter however demands reliable voice/data service, at lower altitude of a cell edge, and the support of seamless handover from the “air” network to the “ground” network. This session will look into both economic and technical factors that are driving different approaches of architecting an A2G solution.