Other Carriers Plan Expanded Service... But You'll Have To
Pay
Passengers on low-cost airline
JetBlue will soon be able to check email and surf the web while
flying across the country. American Airlines and Virgin America
plan to offer their own services within the year, reports The New
York Times... and more carriers will likely add inflight web access
over the next few years.
JetBlue will unveil the service on one of its planes Tuesday,
reports The New York Times. American, Virgin America and Alaska
Airlines plan to offer web access on several of their aircraft in
the near future, at a price of around $10 per flight -- whereas
JetBlue's service will be free for now.
Wireless access will only be available while in cruise flight.
The service will be disabled during takeoff and landing.
“I think 2008 is the year when we will finally start to
see in-flight Internet access become available,” said
Forrester Research analyst Henry Harteveldt, “but I suspect
the rollout domestically will take place in a very measured
way.
“In a few years time,” he added, “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.”
If a trial run last week by JetBlue is any indication, however,
passengers may find inflight surfing isn't quite all it's cracked
up to be... at least not yet.
Due to inherent lags in communication with ground-based stations
-- after all, the newfound Internet cafes will be traveling 500
miles per hour -- and the possibility of dropped connections, web
surfers will experience loading times not seen since the days of
dial-up service on the ground.
"Sometimes you just have to put things out there and see what
happens when people try to use it,” said Nate Quigley, chief
executive of LiveTV, the JetBlue subsidiary responsible for the
airline’s Internet service and current in-flight
entertainment system. “We’ll find the bugs and
eventually get them worked out.”
That's one of the reasons JetBlue isn't charging passengers.
“Why charge for something that doesn’t work very well
yet?” said JetBlue founder and chairman David G.
Neeleman.
Other airlines planning to charge for inflight access will offer
more bandwidth and higher-speed connections, thus justifying the
charges. JetBlue, by comparison, will only offer email access, and
limited web surfing.
In theory, the technology also allows Internet telephone
access... but that's a capability almost universally panned by
airlines and passengers alike, due to privacy and noise
concerns.