Viasat is working to integrate Telesat Lightspeed LEO into its business aviation connectivity portfolio. This will add a third orbit to the GEO and forthcoming HEO connections Viasat offers and, says Claudio D’Amico, Vice President of Strategic Market Engagement, Business Aviation, it’s all about delivering the robust inflight quality of experience Viasat’s customers want
In partnership with Telesat, Viasat expects to introduce multi-orbit connectivity for business aviation customers from 2028. Claudio D’Amico, Viasat’s Vice President of Strategic Market Engagement, Business Aviation, says: “We’re leveraging Telesat’s Lightspeed low-earth orbit [LEO] constellation to bring data into the solutions that Viasat offers across multiple markets. For business aviation, we’re integrating it with our existing Ka-band GEO [geostationary earth orbit] solution.”
The multi-orbit product will be delivered by an electronically steered array (or antenna) (ESA) connecting to Lightspeed while one of Viasat’s existing Ka-band tailmount antennas connects to its GEO constellation. Perhaps the smartest part of the offer, Viasat will integrate these two connectivity ‘pipes’ into a single terminal to provide full redundancy and a simultaneous link optimised for specific applications. Speaking early in February 2026, D’Amico confirmed: “We’re working to lock in the details of the airborne terminal and expect to have more details at the EBACE show [European Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition] in June.”
While the benefits of multi-orbit connectivity are significant, D’Amico sees the availability of LEO in Viasat’s portfolio as more than part of a package deal. “It gives us the flexibility of offering simultaneous links for more capability, but I expect some customers will seek a more tailored offer and that gives us the option to design LEO-exclusive or GEO-exclusive solutions. Essentially, it gives us more supply [of bandwidth] to satisfy specific demands –we’ll have the potential to leverage the LEO side for more video-intensive calls, enhancing the experience, for example.”
The market has already seen that the ESAs serving competitor LEO systems are sufficiently compact to sit atop the fuselages of light jets and even turboprops. Might the ESA component of Viasat’s forthcoming offer reach into the same markets? Treading carefully, D’Amico responds: “It’s an interesting market where we haven’t played in the past because we’re primarily focused on super mid-size and large-cabin jets. An ESA solution presents an opportunity, further options for a roadmap of things we can explore.”
Busy market
D’Amico and the Viasat business aviation team are excited at the possibilities a multi-orbit offer will deliver from 2028, but LEO solutions are available from other providers today and in some cases being paired with GEO antennas to achieve the kind of resiliency and optimised service D’Amico describes. Starlink, the LEO service from SpaceX, and Gogo Galileo, which connects with Eutelsat OneWeb’s LEO constellation, are already flying. In addition, Amazon expects to connect its first airline customer with the Amazon Leo (until recently known as Project Kuiper) constellation in 2027 and could reach out to the business aviation market. In short, Viasat’s multi-orbit solution will enter an already busy market populated by established players.
It is a fact D’Amico acknowledges but refuses to find intimidating. “I think from a customer standpoint we’ll be providing new options that will drive innovation across the industry. That’s a positive thing. And competition is good so long as you are innovating.”
Like Amazon Leo, Telesat Lightspeed operates in the Ka-band, while the Starlink and Eutelsat OneWeb constellations deliver Ku-band to their aviation customers. Ka-band delivers higher bandwidth, suitable for data-intensive activities like movie streaming, for example, and has traditionally been delivered to business aircraft by GEO satellites. Where LEO constellations serve aviation they have primarily delivered Ku-band, the benefits of the lower latency their closer proximity to earth guarantees largely (but not entirely) cancelling out the reduced bandwidth on offer.
An aircraft fitted to receive GEO Ka-band and LEO Ku-band services enjoys the best of both worlds for optimised service, while an aircraft equipped for Viasat’s forthcoming ‘double Ka’ offer arguably optimises the optimisation. The multi-orbit approach also ensures coverage in geographies where connectivity choices are set by local regulation and it is not permissible to connect to a particular constellation type. It provides options in busy regions too, where multiple aircraft are connecting and a network might be overwhelmed. Having GEO and LEO links to a large degree negates these challenges, although it should be noted that GEO constellations are unable to cover the polar regions.
There is also the argument for redundancy. If either system fails, the other is there to pick up most or all of the slack. Depending on the mission, it could be preferable for the principal to have exclusive access to one ‘pipe’ and other passengers and crew to another.
And yet there is a little more to the story. Ka-band suffers more rain attenuation than Ku. There is more to the physics but imagine rain droplets ‘absorbing’ more Ka energy than Ku and you’ll see that Ku-band is potentially more consistent, at least at lower altitudes and on the ground, where an aircraft is more likely to be in weather. Combining Ka- and Ku-band, it could be argued, provides resilience in the event of rain.
Emphasis on experience
You are not alone if the preceding paragraphs have left your head spinning. D’Amico says: “I think we need to simplify the conversation. Customers are looking for a connectivity solution that allows them to do what they want, when they want, with redundancy should something fail. So I think the frequency band is not so important, it’s about the capability. With Ka we can deliver more bandwidth, more throughput, to our customers.”
He also highlights the fact that Viasat is actually entering the multi-orbit market later in 2026, when coverage from its highly elliptical orbit (HEO) satellites becomes available to JetWave customers. Aircraft equipped with JetWave terminals will require a software update that enables continued connection to Viasat’s GEO service and adds HEO, providing full coverage at higher and lower latitudes, including the poles.
D’Amico sees the subsequent availability of Lightspeed as further enhancing the multi-orbit offer. Indeed, JetWave customers installing the new ESA will connect to constellations in three different orbits – if multi-orbit today means two orbits, then from 2028, Viasat’s offer might be considered ‘multi-multi-orbit’. Again though, he emphasises the importance of what will be delivered over how it is achieved. “It’s about the capability. How you really deliver capability for specific use cases.”
Viasat’s emphasis on customer experience over technology is not new to the industry, but outdated discussions on ‘connection speed’ have tended to overshadow it. At last year’s National Business Aviation Association-Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition (NBAA-BACE), Viasat launched Redefining In-Flight Connectivity in Business Aviation, a new report created in cooperation with Michael Schrage, Research Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School. Its findings led Viasat to define a qualitative Quality of Experience (QoE) measuring system ‘able to digest complex technical data in a single metric’. The QoE takes technical details including latency, orbit, speed, geography and more into account and distils them into an easily understood definition of the onboard connectivity experience.
As Viasat places continued emphasis on experience, so D’Amico says the QoE metric is becoming increasingly important. “We’ve evolved the metric from speed, towards something more robust and more representative of the experience. In the long term I think we’re trying to get to the point where we can construct solutions around achieving a specific experience and the inflight QoE is an important factor in doing that. It provides transparent, real-time data around a link and that allows us to tailor capability. We’re adding more GEO satellites, HEO and, later, LEO, and with all that in place, the inflight QoE will help us define a more robust service level agreement, which is where I believe the industry needs to go in the long term.”