U.S. Airlines to Offer In-Air Wi-Fi

"Within the next year, US Airlines are going to be offering Wi-Fi service onboard flights. VoiP calls will be banned initially, but the article mentions that lifting the ban on cellphones may still be a possibility. 'AirCell will install equipment on airliners that will act as a WiFi hotspot in the cabin and connect to laptop computers and devices like BlackBerrys that have WiFi chips. In all, it will cost about $100,000 to outfit a plane with less than 100 pounds of equipment, and the work can be done overnight by airline maintenance workers, AirCell says. What makes the service particularly attractive to airlines is that they will share revenue with AirCell. The service will cost about the same as existing WiFi offerings. Mr. Blumenstein says it will charge no more than $10 a day to passengers. It will also offer discounted options for customers and tie into existing service programs like T-Mobile, iPass and Boingo. Speeds will be equivalent to WiFi service on the ground.'"

Comments

Re:About time this came around.

[FunOne]

Maybe you should try a bit harder to pick your flights & airlines. American Airlines has seat power on all of its airplanes.

This should help:
http://www.seatguru.com/

Re:Laptops and phones on planes

[Joe The Dragon]

the cell phones mess up the cell towers at that hight / speed

Nice try, no donut!

[zappepcs]

I seriously don't think that $10 per day for WiFi connection will satisfy the stockholders/investors.
$4,500,000,000 - At only $100k per plane x 4500 planes that fly in the North America area. (guess)
$xx millions - Wireless spectrum

Well, even with simplified math, that works out to hundreds of millions of user-day revenue just to pay back infrastructure investment. Where is the business plan for that?

Re:Nice try, no donut!

[donutello]

100,000 x 4500 = $450,000,000 (You had one too many zeros)

A simpler way to look at it, however: 6% interest on $100,000 is about $20 per day. If you depreciate the equipment over 5 years, that adds another $60 or so per day. If you figure that the average user will take about 2 flights in a day, you earn about $5 per user per flight. Your average airplane makes about 10 flights in a day giving you a potential customer base of 200 x 10 = 2000. You only need to sell to about 16 of those to pay for the capital costs. If you think you're going to get a higher attach rate than that (and I think you are), this is worth doing. Put in intangibles such as product differentiation and customer loyalty and you're far ahead of your costs.

Re:I'd love to see...

[pipatron]

They don't need to block it, they just have to tell the guy on the phone to shut the fuck up.

Re:Laptops and phones on planes

[Morgor]

Well, 802.11b/g doesn't mess up the navigational systems, but 802.11a does, if you have any of that legacy equipment. It uses 5.5Ghz which is also the spectre in which radar is broadcasted. This is also the frequency many unlicensed WiMAX connections used, although primarily in countries where the original 3.5ghz spectrum is not available for licensing.

Re:Gaming on a plane

[Dynedain]

There is absolutely no way that a laptop carried on a plane can simulate the sound of a real shotgun or rocket.

Have you even heard a real gun before? I guarantee you that the air marshals have.

Re:online is online

[yolto]

No, its pretty unlikely that using your cell phone will cause any problems.. Banning cell phone use is mostly a safety precaution "just in case" the spectrum your phone is using interferes with the planes avionics. Mythbusters did a test where they jacked up the power of a cell phone over 1000 times and it had no effect on the cockpit instruments. Check out http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_49_cell phones_on_plane.html

Now they may ban you from using your phone since they want you to pay for THEIR service, but that's a different story altogether.

Re:I'd love to see...

[Xenna]

May I suggest you use OpenVPN (VPN over TCP port 80/443) instead?
Much more flexible...

X.

Re:Here's hoping they keep phone calls banned

[element-o.p.]

Nah. Any geek worth his salt will just establish an SSH tunnel to his home network and run his VoIP call through the tunnel :)

But at least then you would only have interesting calls (for geeks, anyway).

Re:About time this came around.

[tdischino]

AW = no, AA = yes. Not in every row in coach, usually alternating rows, extending about 2/3s of the way back. There is usually a visual indicator next to the row number on the overhead if there is in-seat power. The power jack is like a car lighter, with a flip up cover over it. Most laptop manufacturers sell an adapted power cord for this.

Re:Um, $100,000 ?

[Blakey Rat]

The wi-fi access point in the plane is the easy part. The hard part is the infrastructure required to get a low-latency, high-bandwidth connection to an object moving at several hundred miles an hour at an altitude of 42,000 feet.

And when I say "easy part", that's relatively speaking. There's still tons and tons of tests to ensure that the wireless access does nothing to interfere with the plane's instruments or communication.

Re:Doesn't Jetblue offer this already?

[sponga]

Yah my buddy moved to an apartment underneath the LAX approach and he leeches off the planes all day long who are lined up.