September 27, 2005 – IFE’s BIG TWO are finding that while wireless is not yielding much in the way of the promised weight savings, they have no choice but to develop wireless capability if they want to get aboard the 787, Boeing’s most important programme in decades.

“Wireless is actually no lighter than a conventional wired solution,” Panasonic Avionics business development director David Bruner told Inflight Online at the WAEA show in Hamburg last week. “But Boeing wants it in order to give the airlines the ability to reconfigure the 787 cabin rapidly and cheaply by moving seats and slotting them into the underfloor plug-and-play power supply. They don’t want IFE data cables getting in the way.”

Thales Avionics’ Ken Brady, chief design engineer for TopSeries, told a similar story. “Our i-8000 architecture for the 787 is just 80lb lighter than our most weight-efficient cabled system, the i-4500,” he said. “But we’re committed to developing a wireless system, driven by the requirements of the 787 programme.”

Thales is looking to deliver a prototype to Boeing by the end of next year. But Panasonic brought to Hamburg for its first public showing a representation of the Wireless X system packaged with a 787 concept seat. “With Wireless X you can do everything you can do with our fourth-generation eX2 wired system,” said Bruner.

Though Panasonic no longer sees wireless as the magic wand for weight savings, it believes the technology does score in its ability to be readily expanded to give more bandwidth. “To get more bandwidth you can very quickly and easily swap out the wireless transceiver,” commented Bruner. “Technology advances mean that the bandwidth available from a transceiver typically doubles every two years.”

As in the handheld sector, security is a major concern for the studios. “We’re in the middle of a 12-month effort to show them that Wireless X is secure,” said Bruner. “We are combining industry-standard security algorithms with proprietary measures of our own. Then we’ll hand the system over to the studios and they will attack it for weeks to see if they can crack it. They don’t want the relatively small market that is IFE to create a hole that makes them vulnerable to widespread piracy.”

Wireless X might have been born of a Boeing requirement but Panasonic has no intention of locking itself out of anything that Airbus does. “We are carrying out general IFE R&D work with Airbus in relation to the A350, looking to reduce weight and power demands,” said Bruner. “Our wireless technology is being considered in this context. But Airbus is still in the early stages of developing its ideas for A350 networking, and we just don’t know whether they will follow the Boeing lead on wireless.”

At Thales Avionics the intention is to give Boeing what it wants for the 787, while retaining the option of offering i-8000 for other types, possibly as a back-up for a primary cabled system.

The Thales work centres on the use of IEEE 802.11a as the core wireless technology. “We’re looking for more solid, consistent data-delivery performance than is achieved by the 802.11a implementations currently used to support public hotspots on the ground,” said Brady. “The aim is to get about 20Mb/sec out of each of the 19 channels of 802.11a that can be used simultaneously aboard an aircraft.”

The company’s Irvine, California, team is also looking closely at 802.11n, currently in development and expected to give 40Mb/sec per channel. But current plans assume that the initial implementation will be based on 802.11a, plus the MPEG-4 video codec operating at 1Mb/sec.

“That would allow us to serve 20 passengers per channel, for a maximum of 380 per aircraft if the system were ever implemented in a 747,” said Brady. “Boeing’s push for wireless is currently specific to the 787, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a successful solution was extended to other types in the range.”

Like Panasonic, Thales is exercised over security. “We’re participating in the standardisation work of the WAEA’s Digital Content Management Working Group, because implementing an individual security policy will not work,” Brady said. “We have to fall in line with DCMWG and incorporate their requirements when they emerge.”

Brady estimated that his team still had another nine months of R&D work to do on the i-8000 architecture. “Then we’ll start component development, looking to integrate a system and deliver a prototype to the Boeing labs by the end of next year,” he said. “Our ultimate aim, however, is to develop not so much a separate system as a new capability to be added to our TopSeries modular range.”