Airbus has delivered welfare communications to International troops in the South of the UK

For service personnel deployed on operations and overseas, being able to stay connected with friends and families back home is vital.

COMMFLEX is an Airbus Defence and Space end to end, fully managed service. By leveraging the OneWeb Low Earth Orbit satellite network, Airbus has provided internet connectivity for welfare and operational purposes, to International soldiers and support staff going through specialist training in Southern England. Delivered as an interim solution until hardwired infrastructure was installed, Airbus deployed an Intellian OW70-L dual parabolic user terminal into a mesh wi-fi network supporting up to 600 concurrent users daily.

With a high number of daily users accessing the service as they would a home broadband connection, Airbus and OneWeb were able to provide an unlimited data allowance, creating flexibility in data usage. Feedback from the users and training service providers has been hugely positive, with site staff sharing “as a short term solution until the delivery of fixed equipment, it should be noted that this method should be considered in the future by other units… The speed and quality of what has been delivered exceeds any other service I have seen in my 15+ years of working in communications. The fact that changes or small improvements to the service can be quickly discussed and delivered at short notice is what makes the fundamental difference”.

Commenting on the success of the operation, Sarah Casenove, Head of Satcom Services at Airbus Defence and Space said; “As a Meta Operator within the SatCom market, we are constantly striving to provide our user community with the best solution to suit their needs and conduct their operations”. We are extremely proud to have been able to provide COMMFLEX Services to our customer and allowing them to maintain distributed, high throughout, low latency connectivity when terrestrial options are not available.