Gogo Business Aviation has completed construction of its seven tower 5G testbed, on schedule and on budget.

"These seven sites will serve as a testbed for our 150 tower nationwide network," says vice president of network operations Mike Rupert. "The testbed includes sites in both remote and populated locations in order to validate the network is operating as designed in all types of environments."

Additional sites will be completed at a rapid pace throughout the first half of 2022, and Gogo remains on track to launch 5G in the second half of 2022.

Gogo 5G is expected to deliver around 25 Mbps on average with peak speeds in the 75-80 Mbps range, and has been designed to deliver high throughput with very low latency to address the increasing demand for data-heavy interactive services like video conferencing.

"I'm proud of our team for completing this major milestone," adds senior vice president of customer operations Dave Glenn. "We'll now begin testing and fine-tuning our network performance, including tower-to-tower handoffs, range and coverage."

Duncan Aviation is working to complete the first-article supplemental type certification (STC) for the onboard 5G system. It will use the experience and data from certifying the first article to modify all of its full-equipment Gogo Avance L5 STCs to include Gogo 5G, covering more than 30 aircraft models. Then business jet operator Jet Edge is to be launch customer in October.

"We're seeing strong demand from our OEM and dealer partners for Gogo 5G," Glenn adds. "And we are confident that our customers will be delighted by its performance."