SkyFive is stepping up efforts to break into the business aviation market for air-to-ground (ATG) in-flight connectivity in Europe. The company was spun off from Nokia in 2019 and, until now, has been largely focused on the airline sector.
“Business aviation is new for us because our focus was originally commercial aviation," SkyFive CEO Thorsten Robrecht told AIN this week at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg, Germany. "Now, as the system is up and running, we have received requests from the business aviation community and we have appointed a new colleague who is now heading this business.”
The hybrid, integrated ATG S-band European Aviation Network (EAN) service—delivered by Inmarsat and Deutsche Telekom in partnership with Nokia, Thales, and others—entered into service in 2019 with a soft launch on British Airways.
Now, the EAN supports onboard internet on hundreds of Airbus A320-series aircraft flown by IAG Group airlines across Europe with Kontron providing the onboard hardware. Equipped British Airways aircraft can also switch automatically between satellite and terrestrial connectivity using an onboard network communicator.
Headquartered in Germany and operating at several research and development and service delivery sites, SkyFive connects aircraft of any kind and size through terrestrial cellular networks, harnessing the performance and cost benefits of 4G and 5G mobile systems.
Outlining what SkyFive could offer a business jet operator, Robrecht said that the significantly reduced weight of the hardware and its ease of installation are huge advantages of the system. “We basically can offer a very small system that it fits very nicely into business jets,” he said of the system, which weighs 7.5 kg (16.5 pounds).
“The system is certainly significantly lighter but it's the exact same system that we install on an Airbus A320, which will be serving a cabin of 130 people—all of them streaming Netflix.”
In addition to the benefits of weight reduction, Robrecht insists that SkyFive’s business model outlook, rooted in the business’s telecommunications heritage, could also be of significant interest to private operators. He said the business is currently testing these different pricing models for the business aviation market.
“The different thing about SkyFive,” he told AIN, “is that we are originally telcos, we do not hail from an aviation or satellite business. For us, an aircraft is a flying mobile phone, which means for us it's an all-flat fee. That means the key difference is that other communication services providers are earning a lot of money on hardware and charging very expensive data tariffs, which means the consumer is penalized.”
“We're exactly the opposite because we have such a big pipe that we can monetize the capacity differently. Therefore, we give the hardware away as cheaply as possible and then we basically offer flat rates data tariffs in the form of a monthly subscription. We're coming from a completely different angle.”
Robrecht admits that the business aviation market was not its initial priority when it launched in 2019. “Our main business was targeted at mass usage in the cabin, 130 people, five flight legs a day. Monetizing 600 people a day, basically, it’s a different mindset. Now as we have had this up and running for some years, we said why not? The network is still not overloaded—it has still plenty of capacity."