In-flight entertainment (IFE) firm the IMS Company has secured "a major airline customer" for its fourth generation embedded data loader.
The order for IMS' so-called TDLg4 will increase the total number of aircraft flying IMS data loading technology to nearly 500, IMS vice-president sales and marketing Harry Gray revealed today at the World Airline Entertainment Association (WAEA) conference and exhibition.
He says the identity of the airline customer will be announced shortly.
"With Gigabit Ethernet and an optional fiber channel, on-aircraft content loading is twice the speed of the earlier product, and the on-the-ground speed to prepare the load set for the fleet is three to five times faster," says Gray.
"We have also replaced the removable hard disk drive with solid state (SD) media, which provides higher reliability, lower cost of ownership, and reduced certification costs for upgrades to higher capacity media."
TDLg4 also provides dual mini-pc express ports that support two wireless cards with 3G cellular (CDMA, revA, GSM, and HSPDA), WiMAX, and 802.11 a/b/g/n, according to Gray. Diversity antennas are supported for 802.11 connections.