The world’s only global high-quality inflight Wi-Fi for business jets achieves major milestone

23 October 2019: Inmarsat, the world leader in global mobile satellite communications, announced today that its market-leading Jet ConneX (JX) business aviation inflight Wi-Fi solution has now been installed and activated on over 600 business jets worldwide.

The milestone was celebrated at NBAA 2019 in Las Vegas, USA, the world’s leading business aviation exhibition, highlighting the rapid uptake of Jet ConneX services in just under three years of commercial availability. Powered by Inmarsat’s global Ka-band satellite network, Jet ConneX offers a reliable, consistent and high-speed Wi-Fi experience, bringing business travellers a level of connectivity in the air that has previously only been available on the ground. Installations have been growing rapidly, with a 50% increase in the past year alone.

The latest installation milestone follows a series of announcements this year detailing Inmarsat’s fully-funded development roadmap for its global Ka-band network, Global Xpress (GX) which currently consists of four high-throughput satellites. The next evolution of the network will deliver eight additional payloads, marking a transformative step-change in inflight broadband capabilities. As part of this programme, Inmarsat will also become the only provider of inflight connectivity in the Arctic region.

The GX network will offer enhanced, focused, ultra-high-power capacity that can be immediately relocated in line with high demand flight patterns and seasonal demand surges across the globe, cementing Jet ConneX’s position as the world’s flagship connectivity for business jets. This future-proofs the ability for business aviation customers to invest in a consistently high quality of service into the future.

Kai Tang, Senior Vice President at Inmarsat, said: “Today marks a significant milestone both for Inmarsat and the business aviation industry as a whole. By successfully achieving more than 600 Jet ConneX installations in just under three years, we have highlighted the ever-increasing demand for global, reliable and high-speed Wi-Fi for business aviation users.

“Jet ConneX has already established itself as the gold standard for business aviation inflight broadband services. Looking ahead, our ambitious plans to build on these capabilities will introduce unprecedented new opportunities to our market and also for our global network of value added resellers – Collins Aerospace, Honeywell and Satcom Direct.”

Jet ConneX is the preferred linefit option of all of the market-leading business jet manufacturers, including Gulfstream, Bombardier and Dassault. In addition, Inmarsat has received type certificate and supplemental type certificate (STC) approvals for Jet ConneX from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) across all popular platforms, OEMs and aftermarket MROs. Aircraft connect to the service using JetWave hardware, offered by Honeywell Aerospace.