French naval surveillance aircraft will take to the skies armed with SwiftBroadband connectivity.

Global satellite communications provider Vizada has partnered with IT and telecoms provider Eclipse to supply the French Navy with a complete package of aero mobile equipment and solutions from EMS Satcom. The upgrade will give France's fleet of Dassault Falcon 50M and Dassault Atlantique 2 aircraft broadband connectivity to enable fast delivery of images and other information while the aircraft survey the country's Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines. Vizada says successful tests of SwiftBroadband have been performed, meeting the French Navy's demand for increased bandwidth as well as high quality voice communications. Inmarsat connectivity has supported French naval surveillance aircraft for a number of years. During flight trials over the Mediterranean in 2004, two bonded Swift 64 ISDN channels were used to send encrypted still pictures and video to the ground at 128 kbps. Eclipse was subsequently selected to supply a complete package of equipment, airtime and support and selected Vizada as partner for the deal. Part of this original deal with the French Navy was Eclipse's offer of an automatic upgrade to SwiftBroadband when the service became commercially available.