Delta Air Lines, one of U.S.’s major carriers, recently announced its plans to provide Wi-Fi access to some of its aircrafts starting this fall and the general introduction of the feature for all of its more than 330 planes by next summer.

"Time on an airplane was either time lost or time found," explained Tim Mapes, Delta's vice president of marketing. "This is going to totally change the dynamics of what a business trip is," he added.

The intention is presented by the company as a first among the United States’ airline companies, even though similar projects have been announced by five other carriers: Alaska Airlines, Jet Blue, American Airlines, Virgin America and Southwest Airlines.

Delta will use a version of Aircell LLC's GoGo service in order to provide the Internet connection and the announced prices are $9.95 for three hours or less of flying and $12.95 for all flights lasting more than three hours. Using the service, Delta’s clients will be able to access their e-mail, corporate VPNs, instant messaging, SMS texting services and every other facility offered by the Web.

Aircell has been developing broadband for both private and commercial aviation since its debut in 1991 and its efforts have been acknowledged on numerous occasions. Its officials explained that the process demands a lot of attention and throughout the testing period they will verify all the aspects in order to make sure that everything goes according to plan. Back in 2006, Aircell won the Federal Communications Commission’s auction, paying $31.3 million in order to gain access to the radio frequency used at the time for the expensive and rather unpopular air-phone services and redirect it for Internet services for airplanes.

The connection is sustained by a network composed of 92 ground-based antennas, placed all across the country, which transmit the signal as high as 45,000 feet and over a radius of 350 miles. For now, the service will only be available in the United States, as the antennas do not function for over-water international flights. There have been several tests for these worldwide flights, but they demand a satellite connection which is far more expensive, delivers a much slower service and the airplanes need to be equipped with additional equipment.

The testing period will include the company’s 133 MD88/90 planes and will later expand to the Boeing 737, 757 and 767 divisions, which are composed of more than 300 aircrafts.

The decision to offer such a service is expected to provide huge financial revenues, as it is a well known fact that people, and especially the ones constantly traveling with business-related objectives, have become dependent of the Internet and cannot conceive staying away from their laptops and emails for more than a few hours.

The service is considered extremely advantageous by all flight companies, as the installation process takes very little time and the equipment’s weight adds very little to the fuel consumption, so the revenues recorded by the companies after installing the system will be rather significant.