wireless internet while flying
 

Does anyone know if UA has plans to offer high speed wireless internet while flying? I had heard about this being planned along time ago. Still in the works?

I know many of the carriers (especially some of the newer, low-cost carriers) are looking at this to differentiate their services and cater more to a specific demographic, but I don't think any of the airlines are actually at a point where it's going to happen in the near future.

Limited roll out started in May on one Lufthansa flight, see

http://www.connexionbyboeing.com/

for details and the airlines that will be offering it.

COOL!!

This I would actually pay for on some of these 12+ hour transpac flights I keep taking. A couple of hours on the net would make time pass much more quickly.

SAS has also recently started to outfit their long haul fleet with WIFI

WiFi on board is useful only when flying in C or higher or if you have a Wifi enabled hand-held.
In coach, there's no room to even open-up a laptop and on LH there's no juice either :(

2 batteries + lightweight laptop + wireless will give me 4-6 hours if you don't tax the laptop's processing power... getting 4 hours of e-mail done on the plane would be well worth any reasonable fee that they implement for it.

Add in the plane cell-phone usage that CNN reported is in the works, and my non-productive flights just became moderately productive.

I’ve been waiting for this service for a long time – this is phenomenal. The ability to actually make a connection while in the air will allow me to get real-time work accomplished while flying; I’d pay for this in a heartbeat. Unfortunately I’m not a frequent trans-Atlantic flyer so for now I’ll only be able to use it at most 2x’s per year, however I imagine UA will pick it up as it becomes more popular.

Is anyone else NOT looking forward to this? Cell phones going off at all hours on a long haul flight where people are trying to sleep. Ugh.

I've used a laptop on many a flight in coach.

In E-, when the person puts their seat back in front of you, I agree, it's hard to get work done on a laptop. However, in E- (with the seat upright), or in E+, it's not *too* bad.

The chances of UA adding WiFi on their planes before 2010 are slim and none. And slim just left town. :(

Sorry, but you'll have to fly non-US airlines to get Wifi in the sky in the next two years and after that I suspect it will be airlines such as JetBlue that add it. UA won't add WiFi because:

1. It costs too much. This is the primary reason. They don't have the cash, nor do I suspect would they be allowed to spend the cash per their bailout and bankruptcy agreements.
2. UA has far too many planes and management doesn't like fragmented rollouts. LH also has a lot of planes, but they apparently can deal with fragmented rollouts better.
3. Culture of getting full buy-in from unions before adding product.

I know for a fact that several of the small, low-cost airlines are seriously considering adding this as a service, and are actively engaged in talks with technology companies about how they can do this in a scalable and value-adding manner.

In my opinion, since the low-cost carriers are small and agile, they can make these changes much easier than the larger carriers, they have less internal red-tape to get through, and they have "grown up" in a competitive environment where they *must* differentiate their services and target particular demographics to win over customers from larger carriers. And, wireless internet access fits into that nicely.

Another thing that is being looked at is offline cached content. For example, every time the plane docks, they hook up a cable (they're looking at wireless docking mechanisms too) to the gate which downloads about 10 or so websites (CNN.com, ESPN.com, DISNEY) and stores it on the plane. Then, instead of having a live feed, people can browse those cached sites from the plane with only a few hour stale factor.

I'm not surprised clueless marketing people are looking into this, but it will never fly (excuse the pun). People want live content. No one will pay for stale content.