Satcom compression, acceleration, consumption management and TCP acceleration

Problem

Latency is the delay that occurs when sending or receiving information from your computer across your ISPs network to the remote server that you are requesting data from. Latency increases when the distance between the client and the server increases. Satellite internet has increased latency due to the amount of distance the signal has to travel from the aircraft, to the satellite and back down to the ground, which when combined to the normal latency issues experienced in terrestrial networks can result in significant data transfer times.

Air Sat One's Solution

Air Sat One's Flightstream™ AOC fine tunes the packet window size or MTU, to the maximum size for the given satellite connection's latency and expected noise/packet error loss. This process, also known as Transparent TCP Acceleration, ensures the end-user achieves maxiumum throughput over higher latency networks.

Problem

Aircraft satellite communications, such as Inmarsat Swiftbroadband has a lower throughput than tranditional ground based broadband internet connections. With a maximum throughput of up to 200 Kbps for low gain systems, 332 Kbps for intermediate gain systems and 432 Kbps for high gain systems, satellite internet provides less bandwidth the typical user may be accustomed to using in their home or office, resulting in slower page loads and downloads.

Air Sat One's Solution

Air Sat One speeds up your connection by filtering your data through our ground based servers, compressing it along the way to reduce the effective amount of data being broadcast from the ground to your satellite connection. Our servers can also remove extraneous and heavy footprinted data that many customers do not want such as ads, flash objects and video. Additionally, our Flightstream™ AOC's web cache stores a copy of all requested web pages, ensuring our customers do not redundantly download data they have already requested, delivering the data from the onboard web cache instead.

Compression: Air Sat One uses lossless compression algorithms to identify statistical redundancy in your data, and then reformats the data stream on the fly to deliver the same data with a much smaller footprint. The Flightstream™ AOC can also perform lossy compression on the images your web browser displays when surfing the web, which degrades the image quality to provide you with up to 90% in data usage savings for image downloads, resulting in significantly faster page loads and much less data usage.

Ad/Content Blocking: Air Sat One allows our customer's to selectively choose what type of data they want to recieve over their internet connection. Some content such as flash objects and video have large data usage requirements and many customers would rather not use their bandwidth allotment downloading these objects. Other objects such as advertisements use substantial bandwitdh and many customers like to block these as well. Air Sat One give you the freedom to use your internet exactly the way you want to.

Web Caching: The Flightstream™ AOC uses web caching to save a copy of all visited web content to the device. If you or another passenger requests content which has already been requested, the Flightstream™ AOC will deliver the content from it's large 7 GB web cache instead of redundantly requesting the data on the internet thereby reducing network traffic and improving access times.

Problem

Satellite communications can be costly to the operator but having the ability to remain productive while in flight is indispensable for many corporate operations. Being able to have a higher performing system provides greater productivity and having this feature at a lower operating cost is essential.

Air Sat One's Solution

By using the combination of the techniques listed above such as image compression, caching and ad/content blocking, our customers can save as much as 80% on their data usage. At the same time these features along with TCP acceleration provide a much faster experience for passengers using the internet on board the aircraft. With our Flightstream™ AOC solution customers can achieve the greatest effiencey, and can see a ROI in as little as 3 months, the Flightstream™ SA solution provides a moderate gain in efficiency while requiring no hardware or software installation, and only a nominal monthly service charge.