Board the plane, turn off your phone ... and surf the Web

[Al-khiyal]

NEW YORK, October 9, 2007 - 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, Pennsylvania.

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, New York. "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.

AirCell, which is servicing American and Virgin America, is using a ground-based technology that accesses existing cell towers. Row 44, which will provide broadband access to Alaska Airlines, is using a satellite-based system like that in Boeing's Connexion. Row 44 executives tout their system as better because it will work over water.

"We can go where land is not, so we can provide service over the oceans for example," says Wendy Campanella, director of business development at Row 44, which is based in Westlake Village, California. "We don't have to build any ground infrastructure."

But AirCell's executives are just as adamant that their system is superior because it uses the vast network of cell towers already in existence.

"There's absolutely no way you can provide as robust, cost-effective, or as good broadband service using any other technology," says Jack Blumenstein, president and CEO of AirCell, which is based in Colorado and Illinois. "It's simple: If you can communicate with a cell tower that's five miles away versus a satellite that's 38,000 miles away, there's absolutely no choice about which is going to be the lowest-cost, most effective, technology."

That said, AirCell plans to eventually provide satellite service for overseas flights.

Such fierce competition is also evident in airline industry itself. That's in part because the carriers operate on very thin margins. The profitability of a flight can be determined by just a few passengers per plane. And so airlines work very hard to engender loyalty in their customers. And since many passengers want Wi-Fi, and would be willing to switch airlines for it, the race is on to be wireless in the sky.

"If less than a single percentage of passengers changed from one airline to another, it would have an enormous impact on profitability, particularly if they're a high-value business traveler," says Mr. Blumenstein.

Executives at American say they're "excited" about the opportunity to test the system, which will allow customers to use their laptops and personal digital assistants.

"We'll be testing this on 15 planes when fully implemented: They are the 767-200 class fleet that is chiefly used for transcontinental flights," says Charles Wilson, managing director for external communications at American Airlines.

Virgin America plans to integrate broadband into its existing seat-back entertainment system on all its Airbus A320s. That way passengers wouldn't even need to bring a computer.

"You could access your e-mail from a seat back: Every one of our handsets already has a 'www.' button," says Charles Ogilvie, Virgin America's director of in-flight entertainment.

Eventually Virgin America passengers will be able to log in with their frequent-flier number, and things will pop up like their playlists and chat names.

Both companies say there will probably be a charge for the service, except for first-class passengers. The amount hasn't been settled upon, but it's expected to be about $10.

As for passengers concerned about cellphones in the sky, there¹s no reason to panic, at least not yet. For now, sky-high cellphones are still banned by the Federal Communications Commission. And American Airlines plans to disable voice-over-Internet options, such as Skype, so passengers don't have to worry about being an unwilling captive audience to one side of someone else's private conversation.

Board the plane, turn off your phone ... and surf the Web

[Bent_Bladi]

didn't already have that?

but screw it - i'm not paying anymore money than i have to for those airlines ppl

[amalgamate]

Virgin America is close on its heels with plans to equip every seat back with high-speed capability by mid-2008.

so the airlines are actually beginning to install these Wi Fi equipment on each seat no matter if the passengers want to use it or not??

I'd rather keep the TV screens rather than have them be replaced by computers.

[Bent_Bladi]

bas wallah virgin atlantic *kisses fingers* mumtazeh.... it has lots of technology but the seats hurt ur but...

[Al-khiyal]

[amalgamate]

haha, funny

I oughta to show ma pops that one...

[Al-khiyal]

December 7, 2007 -- As airlines charge passengers for services that were once complimentary — food, extra legroom in coach, even checking bags (thanks Frontier Airlines) — JetBlue is about to give us, for free, a brand new perk: e-mail, BlackBerry service and instant messaging from the air. Starting next Tuesday, December 11, the "BetaBlue" Airbus A320 will be trying out the system on its runs between cities like New York and San Francisco for the next six months. It will then be rolled out system-wide.

JetBlue is not offering unfettered access to the Web — at least not yet — so no googling your in-flight neighbor. That would require a lot more bandwidth at a much higher cost. Instead, the service turns the plane into a flying Wi-Fi hot spot for mobile devices. When a plane reaches 10,000 feet, three WiFi access points hidden in the cabin's ceiling are activated, so that most wireless devices with Flash browsers or Wi-Fi-enabled laptops can connect to Yahoo Messenger or Mail, which can also be used to send text messages to mobile phones. (Sorry, Gmail and other e-mail services won't work.) BlackBerry handsets will also work just as they do on land. The radios onboard the plane monitor the 100 cell towers around the U.S., looking for the one with the strongest signal. As the plane flies, it leaves one cell tower and connects to another with a better signal. In theory, JetBlue could use the same technology to allow passengers to use their mobile phones in flight, but the airline has mercifully decided against it. (Not so in Europe, where regulators approved in-flight mobile service this summer.) "People don't want that," says JetBlue founder and chairman David Neeleman. "Half of them hating it is too big a risk."

Neeleman said he had been asking JetBlue's engineers about using his BlackBerry on their planes for years, thinking it should be pretty simple. Not only was connectivity more complicated than he thought, it was also extremely costly to create the software needed for full Web browsing. So instead, they came up with the idea of limited access for passengers, partnering with Yahoo and Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. "If we just give people e-mail, that would solve 90% of the problem and would be one-tenth of the cost," Neeleman says. Full Web access would have been so expensive that the airline would have had to charge passengers to use it. "Nobody cares if it's not free," says Neeleman. "It's so irritating to go into a hot spot and have to pay." JetBlue and other airlines learned that lesson with seat-back phones. That service was discontinued because of lack of interest from passengers unwilling to pay several dollars for one in-flight phone call. The ground-to-air spectrum used for those in-flight calls came up for bid in July 2006, and JetBlue's subsidiary, LiveTV, purchased a slice from the Federal Communications Commissions to use for its Wi-Fi service. LiveTV will also offer the new service on its spectrum to other U.S. carriers.

So how well does the in-flight e-mail work? I went on a quick two-hour jaunt from New York City to Washington and back earlier this week to test out the new service and was impressed by the speed. My IMs and BlackBerry messages went through seamlessly to my colleagues even while I was zipping in the air. But we did run into dead spots. For about 15 minutes we were flying along the edge of a cell tower that did not have a strong enough signal to connect, so my e-mails sat in cyberspace limbo. Once the signal became strong enough, the mail went through. For trouble-shooting, don't expect flight attendants to turn into tech support. Dewayne Cook, one of the cheery staff on my test flight, referred me to the card in the seat pocket in front of me. "I think our customers are tech savvy enough," said Cook. Then again, such technical glitches every so often might not be a bad thing. It might just be our last refuge from e-mail at 35,000 feet.

BlackBerrys on a plane