Please tell us who you are on your role at ST Engineering/iDirect?

I’m Andrew Faiola, the Head of Mobility at ST Engineering/iDirect which means I’m responsible for anything that flies, floats or rolls and our go-to-market strategy in those segments

What’s something exciting going on right now at ST Engineering/iDirect?

We have a lot of exciting things going on right now in in ST Engineering/iDirect but also within the satellite industry as a whole that’s really being reflected here. This year we launched an initiative called New Ground that aims to heighten the awareness of innovation that’s going on the ground segment and the integral role that that plays as an enabler of new space. We’re also so focused on tech enablers that are already in use in the telco sector so orchestration, virtualization, standardization that will enable light enable satellite integration into the 5G world and the move into the cloud and its integration with terrestrial infrastructure the innovation and ground segment is crucial to the aero market so our suite of advanced mobility solutions which by the way recently won the mobile satellite users association’s top mobile user experience innovation award demonstrates our dedication to the delivery of these kinds of solutions that help our customers offer seamless connectivity as these new satellite constellations come into service as new applications come and markets are merging together.  Our satellite mobility solutions are really a combination of a number of different sets of capabilities that sort of come together as a whole in order to offer our customers a real choice around the flexibility and the types of services that they can offer the airlines.  The suite of technologies has really evolved so that satellite operators and service providers can really manage those satellite lane aircraft manage – the quality of service of those links to the aircraft and then also manage the quality of experience for the people on the aircraft. Really it’s coming from our heritage and understanding of mobility markets as a whole so aero maritime landing and taking all of that experience to really continue to push innovation and move our sector and our company of course forward and at the end of the day it’s really about trying to deliver that really fabulous end user experience that that is it can be uh to terrestrial networks when you’re flying through the air at a great speed.

How long have you been participating with Seamless Air Alliance and why is your participation important to ST Engineering/iDirect?

iDirect is a market leader in aeronautical connectivity we’re serving a large portion of the mobility market.  We really think it’s our responsibility to be part of Seamless Air Alliance and to ensure that that onboard experience exceeds expectations.  We’re part of the solution on so many aircraft so we need to work clearly collaboratively with the rest of the industry in order to make that happen.  We got involved with Seamless Air Alliance a couple of years ago and we are really great believers in the association’s core mission which is to make the inflight internet experience easy to access and easy to use from gate to gate. To achieve that goal, we need to bring the whole ecosystem together through the SAA and work through all those enablers with so that all of us have that same end goal in mind which again is to deliver a fantastic user experience from gate to gate even from door to door.