Also, they don't buy the consumer-grade internet connections that you may have in your house. The main reason is that the ISPs won't sell such a thing to a business. I know that the BOS club, for instance, is using a fractional (3/4) T-1 circuit, which carries all of the data for the wireless network (when it was on), as well as the desktop PCs, *as well as the agent PCs and kiosks both in the club, at the gate, and at the ticket counters*. Of course, these are separated by a firewall, but this is the only network connection that AA as a whole has at the whole airport, and they probably pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $750/month for it. Of course, business contracts like this with a dedicated loop come with SLA guarantees that you will never see on your consumer DSL line.

(For those about to say that T-Mobile was a separate connection.... well, kind of. The data left BOS and went to wherever it was connected to in a VPN session to T-Mobile, and then left T-Mobile from there. So while you couldn't get into the AA network from the wireless LAN, your data was riding on the same pipe).