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.
