Satcom Direct (SD), a business aviation connectivity provider, has upgraded its Network Operations Center (NOC) at its headquarters in Melbourne, Florida. Within its increased footprint, the centre includes new technologies including a 72x10ft digital wall that will be used to display real-time global customer connectivity activity.
The investment in the operations centre has been driven by the company’s need to intelligently aggregate, collate and analyse the increasing amounts of data generated by business aircraft activity. Information collected from the company’s SD Xperience nose-to-tail range of hardware, software and infrastructure technologies will be collected to ensure that the NOC staff are aware of the network status of each customer’s aircraft globally, for enhanced customer and product support.
Data is aggregated and displayed on the large digital wall using a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The NOC optimises the enhanced visibility into the overall health of each individual aircraft and combines it with intelligent data analysis to identify any connectivity outage, degradation or systemic issues. This process then initiates the implementation of corrective action, often during flight. Predictive alerting is also triggered by the service intelligence platform, enabling remedial action well ahead of potential issues.
SD claims to offer an enhanced average response time of below five minutes, and 24/7/365 support, to ensure that customer issues are handled efficiently and effectively. Cybersecurity management has also been enhanced, with abnormal patterns of data behaviour highlighted to stimulate immediate mitigative action. In addition to technical corrective action, SD alerts crews to advise passengers of any necessary action needed to prevent potential cyber events.
The upgraded technology can also identify systemic issues across partner satellite networks to support implementation of remedial measures, ensuring clients experience limited downtime if an issue occurs.
“Aircraft generate large volumes of multi-faceted data that provide clear insight into aircraft connectivity. If the data is behaving differently than expected we will often be aware of it before either our customer, the end-user or our partners, which means we can begin to fix issues more quickly,” stated SD’s CEO, Jim Jensen. “The investment we’ve made ensures we can extract meaningful information about usage and/or degradation, enabling us to be even more proactive in issue resolution. It puts our support team ahead of the aircraft for years to come.”
