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.

They are paying for it now. Virtually every ISP out there caches content and you are looking at somebodies last viewed page. I remember when Cablevision came to our radio club as they were getting to roll out their internet service one of their points about it's speed was they would cache the entire internet in their office so that when you wanted a page it wouldn't ever leave their system (they immediatly corrected it saying they would cache only the pages other people requested when we asked them how they would cache the entire internet). It's proably not hours old, and I doubt they would not refresh these pages during the flight, but many people, without having a clue it's happening, are getting cached pages thinking that it's live.

Tony,
From what I heard about the test flights (and they were all tech or airline employees) the cell phones caused a yell-a-thon in flight, and one would think these were people trying to be civil and courteous. Even if technology catches up enough to bring the price down to what most carriers can afford, I don't see cell phones being allowed in the regular cabins. There has been talk of a "phone booth" type deal, but that is space most carriers would rather use for other purposes. Wifi would be great, if they can make it work at a reasonable price.

Actually, in the particular case that I am referring to, the airline was looking at including it as a value-added offering that would be available at no cost. I agree, offline content would be a hard sell. But, offering it as a no-cost offering would no doubt be better than nothing at all... reading CNN.com right after takeoff... it's as good as live. Of course, I agree - live is better.

I was referring to reading hours old content. I know for a fact that the pages I read on sites such as ESPN or Flyertalk are not cached more than a few seconds, if that.

Have there been studies done to show that the emi associated with WiFi, cell phones, etc is not a problem onboard airliners now?

Actually there have been studies shown that they were never a safety problem in the first place. Search on flyertalk for several threads on this subject. Or you can fly Lufthansa from Munich to LAX for instance and try WiFi yourself. AA recently had a test flight with normal cell phones using a pico-cell on the plane which beamed up to a satellite.

I was just watching a History Channel show about a theory put forth by a Harvard professor about emi causing the problems that downed TWA 800 and SwissAir 111.

The theory revolved around the route taken by both planes over Long Island and an adjacent quadrant of air space used for military flights and maneuvers.

What was a little scary was that both planes took off at 8:19 pm on a Wednesday and there was thoughts of a periodic military activity causing emi to affect both planes.

The NTSB decided to have a couple of government agencies lookat the emi problem including NASA and the conclusion was that emi wasn't the cause of TWA 800, but the NTSB said that it would be looking at emi as potential cause of future crashes.

Since SwissAir 111 was investigated by the Canadians, I don't know that there was the same level of investigation inot emi.

Just wondered if the NTSB had since come out and stated that emi was not an issue with airliners.

..

EMI with enough power could certainly cause problems with instrumentation. But a cell phone back in the passenger cabin doesn't come close to having enough power. To reiterate from another thread, Boeing, Airbus, the FAA and others did tests with many different cell phones onboard many different aircraft and found zero problem with interference either with the cockpit or the wiring running through the airplane.

This is why we will soon (2006 probably) be allowed to have our cell phones on the plane. The real problem with cell phones on airplanes is they cause havoc with the cell stations on the ground when moving at 500mph. There is an actual FCC (not FAA) regulation against using cell phones on airplanes. But the new system that AA tried out relays the call to a satellite, thus avoiding problems on the ground.

As for Wifi, most access points start out at a maximum of 50 milli-watts. You can add high-gain antennas, but that wouldn't be necessary on an airplane. So WiFi is absolutely no risk to airplane instruments.

Dynamic content is never cached. Most of these news sites use dynamic content, which is generated by scripts. There are also automatic ways for sites to tell downstream providers not to cache documents that are retrieved.

Flyertalk, in particular, is a script based site/forum. Since a script generates the pages, it's pulled fresh each time you request it.

stimpy hit the nail on the head.

I think UA might add this sooner if it proves to be revenue generating for the other airlines. If it's just a nice to have option that does not pay for itself then I don't think we will see it soon. On the other hand if they price it right I think it could be a real money maker.
IPass (www.ipass.com) which many corporations give to corporate travelers to use for WIFI and dialup internet access around the world has just added the Boeing Conexion as a roaming partner so if you have nice base of corporate customers who can easily bill the cost to their employer it might take off!

I wonder what the cost is to outfit an aircraft and what the projected ROI would be?

According to a story in Techworld, Connexion is a million to install per plane, and 12 hours labor. Tenzing, a competitor that uses exhisting telephone connections, costs about 100K to install.

Takes a ton of $14.95 fees to make back a million.

While this is true, there would be competitive strategy implications of not following suit if other carriers put this into their planes. While it may cost them quite a bit up-front to outfit their planes, it may not outweigh the lost revenue from people opting to fly other carriers (with internet access) on longer flights in the long run.

That doesn't wash. UA has already lost countless millions to BA and the Asian airlines over flat business class seats. Now LH and AF are adding flat seats too. That is far more important to high-spending flyers than WiFi. And UA has no immediate plans to add flat biz seats.

LH can see WiFi as a competitive issue since they are competing with AF, JAL, CX, ANA, etc., each of whom have flat biz seats. But so far, only LH has WiFi.