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SITAONAIR is a company that enables airline passengers to use their smart devices including mobile phones and laptops for calls, text messaging, emails and Internet browsing.
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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Telecommunication, Technology, Aviation |
| Predecessor | OnAir |
| Fate | Airbus sold its 33% in OnAir to SITA making it a subsidiary of SITA. |
| Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | David Lavorel (CEO) |
| Website | www |
The company is a fully owned subsidiary of SITA, originally incorporated as OnAir as a joint venture with Airbus in February 2005. In February 2013, Airbus sold its 33% final stake to SITA.[1][unreliable source?] The company is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and sales offices in London, Singapore and Dubai.
SITAONAIR offers services which aircraft operators can use together or separately:
All three services share the same satellite connection to the ground. SITAONAIR (then OnAir) was the first company to provide integrated GSM and inflight wifi services, with Oman Air as the launch airline in March 2010.[5] SITAONAIR's technology has been certified for use on many types of aircraft – both private and commercial jets including Boeing and Airbus – for short and long haul. In most cases, it is available for linefit or retrofit.[6]
A satellite data unit (SDU) manufactured by Thales and branded TopConnect establishes a backhaul link to the ground through Inmarsat's SwiftBroadband geostationary satellite constellation operating in the L band around 1500 MHz which allows the use of electronically steerable antennas mounted atop the aircraft fuselage and encased within a fiberglass, RF-transparent radome that have a low profile compared to systems operating in the Ku bandorKa band which today still require mechanically steerable antennas with a significantly higher profile. Thus drag and fuel costs are reduced allowing economical operation even on smaller aircraft like business or regional jets. Inmarsat's SwiftBroadband system covers much of the planet except for the polar regions above −82 and below +82 degrees latitude and currently provides symmetric data rates of up to 432 kbit/s per channel dependent on signal quality and overall load on the satellite's spotbeam serving the corresponding geographical area. Currently the Thales SDU can bond two channels resulting in a maximum bandwidth of 864 kbit/s.[7]
SITAONAIR was appointed as distribution partner for Inmarsat's Global Xpress service in November 2011.[8]