The 465,000 new subscribers added in Q1 mean SiriusXM's subscriber base topped 30 million, it said in a news release Monday. Self-pay additions were 348,000 for the quarter, leaving its self-pay subscriber base at 24.6 million as of March 31, it said.

Airlines now can get Gogo's 2Ku in-flight connectivity system installed on new Airbus A350 aircraft by the Airbus Corporate Jet Centre through an agreement with Airbus, Gogo said in a news release Wednesday. Gogo said Delta Air Lines is a customer and will receive its first 2Ku-equipped A350 in 2017.

Tying its new offering to the NCAA basketball tournament, Dish Network launched Sports Bar Mode, or MultiView, for Hopper 3 customers Wednesday night in a software update. The multichannel view divides a 4K or HDTV screen into quadrants, each capable of displaying a different program. The feature works by decoding four different feeds and displaying them simultaneously, said Dish. Availability of Sports Bar Mode was timed to arrive in time for the first round of NCAA basketball games, during which several matchups are played at the same time, Dish said. The software update also included performance enhancements and general bug fixes. Sports Bar Mode works with all live, linear channels in Dish’s programming lineup, and on demand content and recorded TV shows and movies, Dish said. Consumers tap into the feature through the Options button and then Picture in Picture. Users toggle through the four programs to select the one that will have the audio feed, it said. Other multichannel configurations are possible with Hopper 3, including a split-screen feature that places two channels side-by-side and a setting that overlays a second channel in the TV screen's upper right-hand corner, Dish said.

In-flight connectivity company executives threw a number of verbal elbows at one another over data capacity and the future of air-to-ground (ATG) connectivity, at a panel Tuesday at Satellite 2016. "Some of the exaggeration is going to come back and bite some of us," said Leo Mondale, Inmarsat president-aviation. Air passengers want the same kind of connectivity they get on the ground, Mondale said, but "I don't know if there's enough [demand] to float the boat of everyone up here [on the panel]." Mondale and Gogo Chief Technology Officer Anand Chari went back and forth with Don Buchman, ViaSat general manager-commercial mobility, on ViaSat's in-flight broadband offering on JetBlue and United. Chari and Mondale called it "a marketing stunt." "It's not a claim -- just buy a ticket on JetBlue," Buchman said. Chari said that alongside Gogo's efforts on the launch of its 2Ku satellite connectivity service (see 1508240040), it's also working on its next-generation ATG, which includes its interest in the air-to-ground mobile broadband spectrum it asked the FCC to auction (see 1503100047). Financially, ATG becomes viable compared to satellite in-flight connectivity if there is adequate spectrum -- which Gogo doesn't currently have, Chari said. Cost of spectrum "is what swings this thing from reasonable to unreasonable," said David Bruner, Panasonic Aviation vice president-global communications services.

Gogo wants special temporary authority (STA) to allow up to 200 earth station aboard aircraft (ESAA) terminals to communicate with satellites Intelsat 18 and Yamal 401, it said in an FCC International Bureau filing Thursday. Gogo said it needs the STA to meet customer demand for in-flight connectivity in the South Pacific and over Russia while its application to modify to ESAA is pending before the FCC. Neither satellite will be used in U.S. airspace, Gogo said.

The FCC Public Safety Bureau and EchoStar are in a disagreement over security issues for satellite communications terminals. The bureau, in a filing Tuesday in RM-11664, said it was supplementing a previous EchoStar ex parte filing on a meeting between EchoStar and FCC staff over proposed uses of the 28 GHz and 38 GHz bands. At the meeting, FCC staff questioned fixed satellite service security readiness and provided an IOActive presentation describing numerous security vulnerabilities in terminals, such as back doors, hard-coded credentials, insecure protocols and weak password resets. According to the FCC, EchoStar "stated that it was familiar with the IOActive research paper but indicated it contained some inaccuracies, without elaborating." The FCC, in a footnote in Monday's filing, said its staff "is not aware of any inaccuracies associated with this research."

Gogo plans to make satellite modems compatible with its planned 2Ku in-flight connectivity service and commercially available in 2017, it said in a news release Monday. Testing for the modem will begin on Gogo's Boeing 737 test lab "in the coming months," Gogo said. The modem will be capable of delivering 400 Mbps to an aircraft and of simultaneously supporting IP streaming and IPTV, it said. Gogo said it's working with Gilat Satellite Networks on modem development.

SoftBank will provide high-speed commercial LTE service in Japan this year using Gilat's satellite-based cellular capabilities, the companies said in an announcement Tuesday. SoftBank said it already provides 3G mobile communications in Japan using satellite communications as backhaul. The LTE service announcement follows trials demonstrating file transfer protocol downlink rates of up to 100 Mbps using actual mobile handsets, the two said. “We will be able to also offer high-speed LTE services in mountainous regions, remote islands and other areas in Japan where it is difficult to install fixed-line backhaul cost-effectively and quickly," said SoftBank Head-Technology Unit Yasuyuki Imai. "We already have satellite-based backhaul in those regions, but now we will be able to offer our customers LTE speeds. We also expect to see the application of this technology to the mobile network of our group company Sprint in the U.S. Our hope is that this technology will help play a role in bridging the digital divide.”

Dish Network's Hopper 3 home DVR system is commercially available to subscribers, the company said in a news release Monday. Dish announced its Hopper 3 at CES last month (see 1601060011) and said it would launch the Netflix app for Hopper 3 and integrate Netflix results into its universal search feature "in the coming weeks.”

Honeywell Aerospace's JetWave wireless in-flight connectivity system received Federal Aviation Administration approval for use in Boeing 757s, the company said in a news release Thursday. JetWave connects to Inmarsat's Global Xpress constellation, Honeywell Aerospace said.