Airbus speaks to Euronews Next at the Mobile World Congress about its plans to unify aerospace connectivity.
Europe’s largest aeronautics and space company is aiming for its aircraft, helicopters, and satellites to be all connected through a single, open, standards-based network. The company believes 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) technology is the key to its vision.
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“Our vision is pretty clear,” said Olivier Hauw, head of SpaceRAN demonstrator and fast track leader in Connectivity at the Mobile World Congress.
“Digital transformation is there. It differently impacts all industries, including every industry like ours. We need to make sure that we can leverage this digital transformation — meaning we can onboard AI technology, we can onboard cloud technology in our products. And for this, we need connectivity.”
At the centre of Airbus’s connectivity push is SpaceRAN, (Space Radio Access Network), which aims to enable standardised global connectivity by exploring advanced 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) capabilities. The technology demonstrator was developed under its innovation subsidiary, Airbus UpNext.
Launched in mid-2024, the programme is testing 5G New Private Network (NPN) technology with the explicit aim of merging terrestrial mobile networks and satellite networks into one seamless ecosystem.
This would look like the same situation with smartphones, meaning “you can go anywhere around the globe and your smartphone will work just because you rely on a complete standard solution,” he said.
'The daily challenge'
The aim is to give aircraft operators a permanent, global connectivity based on roaming agreements.
As the company is building SpaceRAN around open standards, rather than being closed like US companies, it has helped to attract more than 10 partners from across the globe.
“We play a different game,” Hauw said. “We play open standard versus all these proprietary solutions and vertical integration that exist today.”
Despite being a European company, Airbus says SpaceRan is a global initiative.
“What we do today is that we bring players from the terrestrial mobile industry and satellite players. And we combine all these players together,” Hauw said.
Key priorities for Airbus in a 6G world include GNSS-free navigation capabilities — a growing concern as GPS jamming and spoofing incidents increasingly affect commercial aviation — as well as integrated Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) functionality as a resilient alternative to existing satellite navigation systems. The company also wants very low-latency connectivity to support aircraft-to-aircraft communication.
“We know that GNSS signal is highly jammed, which we are facing, or our customers are facing daily with GPS spoofing or jamming,” the executive noted, adding that PNT features would offer “a complement to this GNSS and positioning system, and certainly much more resilient,” Hauw said.
But Airbus is clear about what it will take for SpaceRAN to amount to anything beyond a demonstration.
But the executive said proving commercial viability is just as important as proving technical feasibility.
“If you come with something which is just fantastic from a technical perspective, but it doesn’t make sense from a pure financial perspective, then it will not work,” Hauw said, adding that “this is our daily challenge, but I can tell you we have a fantastic team within Airbus to make it.”
