CEO of SkyFive, Thorsten Robrecht
Air-to-Ground (A2G) broadband technology provider SkyFive is paving the way for short-haul flight operators to close the connectivity gap for their fleets. LARA spoke with SkyFive’s CEO, Thorsten Robrecht, to find out more.
This article was published in the August/September 2024 issue edition of LARA.
What does SkyFive do?
We are a broadband provider in the sky, connecting aircraft of any kind and size – commercial airliners, business jets, helicopters, and even drones. Unlike legacy service providers, we rely on a technology called Air-to-Ground (A2G), which connects aircraft from the ground up rather than from satellites in space.
SkyFive was spun off from telecommunications giant, Nokia, in 2019, where the prestigious Bell Labs group had originally invented the A2G technology before fully industrialising it.
Our mission is to bring broadband to every aircraft and close the wide gap that we found
between connectivity on the ground and in the sky.
What seperates your A2G broadband connectivity solution from your competitors?
Performance is what really sets A2G apart from legacy and future satellite systems. We provide a home-like internet experience by virtue of combining high throughput with low
latency. By the same token, there is an abundance of capacity, given the cellular structure of our networks, which provide uncontested bandwidth to every aircraft – and to aircraft only.
Secondly, A2G is a much more cost-effective technology. The antenna is the size of a coffee cup. It can be easily mounted within a day on the belly without structural changes to the fuselage. We also provide ‘all you can eat’ data, which means there are no quotas. Airlines can offer paid or free Wi-Fi to their passengers without regret.
The small size and low weight of the system also contributes to the sustainability efforts of airlines, as it does not induce additional drag or increase fuel consumption. Significant weight can be saved by removing seatback screens, especially on single-aisle aircraft that fly shorter routes, where passengers typically prefer internet access for their own devices over a movie.
Which markets do you serve, and where are you seeing the most growth for SkyFive’s solution?
We generally go where commercial air traffic is dense and the penetration of in-flight connectivity is low. Europe was the cradle for our technology, and from there we went eastbound towards the Middle East, India, Asia-Pacific and China.
Valour Consultancy, in their quarterly IFC tracker, assessed that 74 per cent of single-aisle aircraft are still unconnected, and most fly in the mentioned markets, which happen to be also the fastest growing ones in terms of overall airline capacity.
What these markets have in common is a young, digitally affine population, which expects to have perfect broadband connectivity at the utmost lowest price point.
What makes your solution attractive to those low-fare or regional airlines wanting IFC on their fleet?
Most low-fare carriers (LFCs) have been shying away from satellite-based in-flight connectivity because of its negative business case, which is the result of high cost of ownership and poor passenger adoption (which in turn is the result of high session prices and frustrating user experience).
With A2G we can solve this conundrum by delivering home-like internet speeds, providing enough capacity for the entire cabin to come online and cutting the cost all at the same time. Consequently, LFCs can make internet access as cheap as a coffee, and spread the fixed cost across many passengers, based on the higher load factors and route frequencies that these airlines typically achieve compared to their competitors.
How are you making sure to future-proof your A2G technology to keep up with passenger demand?
Our A2G technology closely follows the mobile industry roadmap, which innovates relentlessly in performance, cost per bit, environmental sustainability, and many other dimensions.
In data communication, the aviation industry is far behind what is state of the art on the ground. We will continue leveraging technological enhancements from the vast mobile ecosystem as a broadband technology provider. At SkyFive, we strongly believe in standards, open interfaces, and
interoperability, much more than our competitors do. The A2G system is already well-dimensioned to handle the surge in demand that airlines can expect once Wi-Fi becomes fast, cheap, and eventually free to passengers.
Taking out cost is equally important, and consequently we are running several development initiatives to further reduce the size and weight of our onboard equipment. For example, we are flight-testing antennas in the form of adhesive strips, which can be glued to the bottom of the fuselage.
