SKYFive Korea (CEO Hong Sa-wook) announced on 1 August that it has signed a business agreement with SKYFive AG, headquartered in Germany, to bring the leading European inflight connectivity technology now exclusively to Korea, connecting the local sky.
SKYFive Korea is creating with its local partners a world leading Air-to-Ground (A2G) aircraft connectivity service, providing — with its local team — all related equipment, services and technical support, delivering A2G services to civil aircraft, helicopters, and future taxi drones in Korea. Today’s aircraft are mostly not connected, with the industry suffering from expensive and very limited satellite services suitable mainly for long haul flights.
During more than 10 years of R&D, SKYFive has created a breakthrough technology to connect fast and high flying objects from the ground – using existing, standard telco (LTE / 5G) infrastructure.
After gaining several years of airline service experience in Europe with its satellite and telco partners, SKYFive is now ready to make this patented technology available as standalone or combined service for the world leading technology market in Korea.
SKYFive’s core patented A2G solution directly transmits radio waves from a ground base station into the sky, providing low latency broadband connectivity up to 100 times cheaper than existing systems, able to securely serve also high and fast flying objects.
Beyond the cost benefits, A2G has great advantages in terms of data traffic processing speed, such as providing up to 1 gigabit capacity with a latency of less than 1 millisecond.
Hong Sa-wook, CEO of SkyFive Korea added: “Beyond simply being able to freely use the internet on board, we are innovating customer value through various business models such as in-flight contact-free food and beverage service, in-flight duty-free service, delivery service for airport goods to destinations, and marketing & advertising. In addition to civil aviation, we plan to lead the market by applying SKYFive’s A2G solutions to various fields such as public safety (helicopter) and taxis drones (Urban Air Mobility) in the future.”
About SKYFive
SkyFive provides Inflight Connectivity services based on its unique Air-to-Ground technology. The company’s mission is to deliver true broadband services to airline passengers, enable the real-time transfer of vast amounts of aircraft data, and support ultra-reliable low latency communications required for the mass proliferation of Urban Air Mobility. SkyFive connects aircraft of any kind and size through giant cells in the sky, thereby leveraging the performance and cost benefits of the 4G and 5G mobile ecosystem. SkyFive has been established as a spin-off from Nokia in 2019, is headquartered in Munich, Germany and has several specialized sites for R&D and services in several countries.
Featured image credited to istock.com/Nick Whittle
