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Board the plane, turn off your phone ... and surf the Web
American Airlines and Virgin America plan to offer wireless Internet next year, and other airlines will be watching the results closely.
By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the October 9, 2007 edition
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NEW YORK - Coming soon to an airplane near you: broadband.
That's right, wireless Internet service that will allow passengers to send messages, surf the Web, and, yes, check in with the boss at 30,000 feet.
American Airlines is first out of the starting gate domestically. It expects to have a test plane operating by December, and its whole transcontinental fleet of 767s ready in 2008. Virgin America is close on its heels with plans to equip every seat back with high-speed capability by mid-2008. And Alaska Airlines will run a test next spring and, based on its outcome, the company hopes to outfit its whole fleet.
Surveys show that as many as 70 percent of passengers want wireless Internet, also known as Wi-Fi. Many of them would be willing to change airline loyalty for the service. And so every other major US carrier is watching these experiments closely. They're also engaged in serious discussions about if and when to wire their fleets, according to broadband innovators AirCell and Row 44, the two major companies providing the technology for planes.
Aviation experts say the advent of Wi-Fi skies is all but inevitable, offering one of the few bright spots on the horizon in these not-so-friendly times when a third of all flights are now delayed.
"Could you imagine a world five years from now where it wasn't the case that you had access to broadband virtually everywhere, including in the air?" says Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition in Radnor, Pa.
This isn't the first time airlines have experimented with airborne broadband. Boeing offered a service called Connexion, which Lufthansa and several Asian airlines used in 2004. But in August 2006, Boeing discontinued the service, saying the market they'd hoped for hadn't materialized. Part of the problem was that the antennas used to pick up the satellite signal were heavy and only appropriate for wide-body planes like a 747. The antennas created drag and increased a plane's fuel burn. Also, because so few planes were equipped with it, passengers sometimes were unaware Wi-Fi was available.
"Anybody that used it, loved it. For $30, you got eight hours of productivity on a transatlantic flight," says Robert Mann, president of R.W. Mann & Co., an aviation consulting business in Port Washington, N.Y. "Unfortunately, it never broke out of an introductory, beta-test pricing model."
In the five years since Boeing started its Connexion experiment, technology has changed. Antennas are now lighter and less expensive and can be installed on everything from a Jumbo 747 to a regional jet. Even the type of broadband offered has expanded.
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