Airborne Internet closer to reality
As millions of travelers prepare to fly home for the holidays this year, a few thousand can expect to try out a new generation of onboard e-mail and text-messaging services using their own cellphones and portable devices.
Starting this week and over the next few months, several airlines in the United States and Europe are due to begin testing these new services on some of their planes, with plans to roll out the technology across most of their fleets over the next 12 to 18 months.
Eventually, a few plan to enable voice calls, too.
On Tuesday, the U.S. carrier JetBlue Airways will begin offering a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one aircraft, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer a broader Web experience in the coming months, probably at a cost of around $10 a flight.
In Europe, Air France-KLM plans to begin a six-month test of text and e-mail on one of its Airbus A318 jets before the New Year, while BMI of Britain, TAP of Portugal and the low-cost Irish carrier Ryanair have said they will introduce similar services by the end of March.
“I think 2008 is the year when we will finally start to see in-flight Internet access become available, but I suspect the rollout domestically will take place in a very measured way,” Henry Harteveldt, an analyst with Forrester Research, said of the U.S. trials. “In a few years’ time, if you get on a flight that doesn’t have Internet access, it will be like walking into a hotel room that doesn’t have TV.”
The upcoming trials follow months of tests by the Australian airline Qantas, where more than 11,000 domestic air passengers have experienced either text-messaging or e-mail services using their cellphones, BlackBerrys, Treos or other “smart phones” on board one of the airline’s Boeing 767 aircraft.
Emirates, based in Dubai, equipped 10 of its Airbus A340-500 jets with an onboard Wi-Fi system this year that allows travelers to access their personal Web mail accounts - including Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL. The service is available on selected flights between Dubai and destinations in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Germany.
Inflight Internet service is not new - it has just never taken off commercially. Boeing developed a service called Connexion in 2000, which was used by several major carriers, including Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines. But at $9.95 an hour, many passengers found the cost prohibitive and the plane maker abandoned the system in 2006 after failing to drum up sufficient demand.
“It was one of those cases of the chicken and the egg,” said Stephen Forshaw, a Singapore Airlines spokesman. “To get the price down, Boeing needed the volume, but to get the volume, they need to offer it a lower price.”
Many of the current onboard systems enable passengers to use their own mobile devices or laptops, while other services are linked in to the aircraft’s seat-back entertainment or air-to-ground telephone system, enabling passengers who are not traveling with laptops or smart phones to send messages on a flight. Emirates, for example, began offering seat-back e-mail and text messaging in 2003, a service now available across its fleet of more than 100 planes. Qantas, too, offers seat-back text-messaging on about a third of its fleet. Such networks can also be used for communications within the plane, including seat-to-seat messaging or placing food and drink orders - something Virgin America already does with its seat-back system.
While the technology could allow travelers to make phone calls over the Internet, few say they plan to allow voice communications.
Air safety and communications regulators in the United States have yet to give their blessing to voice calls, but their counterparts in Europe, Australia and parts of the Middle East have done so. Still, recent surveys by the airlines have shown that many travelers find the prospect of voice calls much less palatable than having a seatmate quietly browsing the Web.
That customer ambivalence will not be stopping Ryanair, however. The largest low-cost carrier in Europe plans to roll out a full range of mobile text and voice services on 25 of its Boeing 737s sometime in the first quarter of 2008. A spokesman for Air France-KLM said it would try out voice calls for three months next year, but would await customer feedback before deciding to enable the service more broadly.
Over the next one to two years, several other carriers, including Royal Jordanian Airlines, Kingfisher of India, AirAsia of Malaysia and Shenzhen Airlines in China all plan to offer various in-flight mobile and Internet services to passengers.
Source: iht.com
