Cathay Dragon, the regional airline of the Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Group, is now enjoying enhanced communications at Clark International Airport. This follows the installation of SITA AirportHub, the unique shared infrastructure which allows airlines to connect their applications and IT systems at an airport quickly and easily.
Clark International Airport is supporting the growing demand of air traffic in the Philippines. Located in Central Luzon, it serves both North-Central Luzon and the northern Metro Manila area. The local catchment area has an estimated population of 23 million and in 2017 the airport’s passenger numbers rose 58% to its highest levels ever.
Alexander Cauguiran, Acting President and CEO of Clark International Airport, said: “We have worked with SITA to get AirportHub at Clark International because it allows us to provide the airlines, ground handlers and our other tenants with secure and reliable bandwidth, including wireless connectivity to access off-airport applications. As more airlines choose to use Clark International they can be assured that they will have world-class, resilient and cost-effective communication services available to them.”
Kerry Peirse, Cathay Pacific General Manager, IT Infrastructure and Operations, said: “As an airline we need to be agile and be able to open new routes quickly and easily. When we connect our systems at an airport, like Clark International, that already has SITA AirportHub in place everything moves faster. Being able to connect to AirportHub removes the complexity of dealing with local telecom providers. It is streamlined and efficient, which means we can be up and running in a matter of weeks not months and the secure shared infrastructure offers consistent global service standards.”
Both Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon are long-time users of SITA AirportHub, with the service already in place at 74 airports worldwide where the airlines operate. They use AirportHub for critical front and back-office services and require strong, reliable, resilient, and yet cost-effective connectivity solutions for many bandwidth-demanding applications. They achieve this by leveraging the broad footprint of the SITA AirportHub shared infrastructure.
Sumesh Patel, SITA President, Asia Pacific, said: “As passenger numbers continue to rise in Asia Pacific, airlines and airports are looking for services that maximize infrastructure. This is exactly what AirportHub enables. Clark International is the latest airport to join the growing number of airports that are working with SITA and the airlines to use shared infrastructure to deliver world-class services cost-effectively.”
The rollout of AirportHub across the world’s airports is multi-year investment by SITA on behalf of the airline and airport community. Over the next three years, SITA plans to have AirportHub deployed at airports reaching a total of 80% of airlines’ international destinations.
Sumesh added: “Our investment in this strategic shared infrastructure, provides communication services backed by resilient dual access, greatly minimizing the likelihood of network isolation at the airport. The entire community can benefit from the reliable, secure, cost-effective, and scalable communications services which are enabled at the airports and which are the foundation upon which all the airport IT systems operate.”
Today, SITA AirportHub is at more than 400 airports and provides 6,500 connections across the world. These range from remote and regional destinations serving less than a million passengers to the largest international hubs of the world, which together manage hundreds of millions of passengers every year.
