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Southwest Airlines will try out Row 44’s satellite-backed Internet service on one plane this year: The discount carrier plans to equip one 737-700 with Row 44’s Ku-band satellite Internet service by the end of the year for a 2-to-3 month trial. In first quarter 2009, FlightGlobal reports, other 737-700s will be added, and a variety of flight durations will be tested.
Row 44 continues to claim what seems to me to be an impossibly high speed: here, Southwest is saying 31 Mbps downstream. I will believe this when I see it. Ku-band transponders are capable of very high speed data transmissions, but I’m not convinced that this rate is sustainable to each plane and represents actual net throughput. We’ll see. (The only other speed I’ve heard for Ku-band was 12 Mbps from Panasonic Avionics, when they were considering firing back up a network similar to Connexion by Boeing.)
Southwest plans to filter. Yeah, let me know how that works out for you guys.
Posted by Glennf at 1:27 PM | Comments (0)
In-flight call providers form lobbying group to dissuade formal ban on in-flight calling: FlightGlobal reports that OnAir and Aeromobile have formed the Passenger Communications Coalition—Peacekeeper missiles, anyone?—to prevent the Hang-Up Act that would provide a formal, instead of regulatory and procedural ban on placing phone calls in flight. OnAir’s CEO makes the specious remark that this would be “putting the US behind the rest of the world.”
Hardly. Americans aren’t used to paying $2.50 per minute in the air that used to be a typical ground roaming rate until EU regulators pushed hard. US flyers would (surveys show) prefer the broadband that American, Delta, and Virgin are in various stages of commitment to.
In any case, how would having a total ban on in-flight talking that affected all over-US flights make us less competitive? Oh, yeah, we’d miss that one call that doomed our business while our European competitor was chatting away.
Posted by Glennf at 9:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Trade mag Flightglobal gets the full story on Qantas’ in-flight calling, texting, and Internet plans: A few days ago, it seemed to come out that Qantas had dropped Aeromobile (its test partner last year) for OnAir, and was moving to Internet service on A380s instead of in-flight cell calling and texting. Flightglobal clears the air, and reveals that Qantas will offer all of the above. (I wrote about this in “Sorry, Qantas, No Unfettered Broadband.”)
OnAir was chosen for A380 service, with the initial rollout—especially for international flights—using the 64 Kbps Inmarsat satellite offering, which is too paltry for anything but limited text communication. When the recently launched Pacific satellite is active—which may take up to a year—OnAir and Qantas can upgrade to the luxurious nearly 500 Kbps per channel service.
The head of OnAir is pushing some mighty serious horsehockey, however, when he says as quoted by Flightglobal that he “is confident that once the full service is up and running, passengers will be able to access the Internet ‘in exactly the same way as they can on the ground.’” That may be the case in terms of access, but not in terms of cost. The cost will be enormously high unless OnAir has a magic deal with Inmarsat that’s previously undisclosed. I suspect a per MB charge will be in effect that will discourage much use. Calls and texting could be carried over the same system, of course.
Qantas plans to continue to work with Aeromobile for domestic service, with calls and texting available, on their Boeing 767-300s and Airbus A330-200s, Flightglobal reports. Aeromobile has plans to launch a full Internet service later this year using cached and live content. [link via Fabio Zambelli]
Posted by Glennf at 4:01 PM | Comments (0)
Qantas backs off from earlier plans, changes provider for in-flight broadband: The Sydney Morning Herald somewhat erratically and incompletely reports that Qantas has delayed and modified its in-flight broadband plans. Aeromobile was the provider when the service was tested in second quarter 2007, but OnAir is now described as the airline’s partner. This was noted by colleague Fabio Zambelli, who emailed me the news, and has his own account at setteB.IT (in Italian).
OnAir has so far tested their calling/texting-only service on two aircraft—one operated by Air France, one by TAP Portugal—even though RyanAir announced plans that its planes would started being unwired with the service by late 2007. Still no word on that fleet progress.
Qantas will apparently launch cached Web browsing and limited Web email (probably through a proxy) along with instant messaging, with full Internet service coming “later in 2009.” This is clearly due to a lack of satellite coverage that was just remediated a few weeks ago (see below). The first plane with limited service, a new A380, should be in flight 20-October-2008.
I hate in-flight
broadband
The Morning Herald seems to overstate the importance and scope of a complaint filed by the union representing American Airlines’ flight attendants. The detailed coverage in the U.S. had more to do with the potential for issues, and likely attendants lack of interest in policing yet another media on the plane. Filtering doesn’t work, the attendants probably already know, and this may just be a negotiating point with the airline.
On why Qantas is waiting until late 2009? This requires unwinding how OnAir gets its signal.
Aeromobile and OnAir both rely on Inmarsat satellites for their service. Both companies had several years ago staked their futures on the fourth-generation network Inmarsat was to inaugurate with three satellites that would use beamforming to allow precise delivery of nearly 500 Kbps per receiver, with hundreds or thousands of regions being able to be targeted from a single satellite. Inmarsat’s third-gen network—don’t confuse this with 3G cellular ground-based networks—can deliver about 64 Kbps per channel.
Now, unfortunately, Inmarsat was three years late on launching its trans-Pacific bird. While the company claims 85 percent coverage of the earth and 98 percent coverage of population, there’s a big gap over the Pacific that also prevents them from having good overlap between the U.S. and Japan/China/Korea, as well as the southern Pacific, covering Australia. Since the biggest market for long-haul flights would likely be Australia, Japan, and China, traveling trans-Pacific or trans-hemispheric routes, that gap is rather large.
Aeromobile opted to build out a service, deployed only by Emirates airline as far as I can tell, that uses the 3G service since it was available, and most necessary equipment is already installed on most over-water planes. OnAir was waiting for 4G, which has necessitated a long wait, but allowed them to launch in Europe with a seemingly next-generation service. Given that OnAir is controlled by an airline-owned integration firm, SITA, and by Airbus, they’re not going anywhere.
Inmarsat finally lofted its third satellite on Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 19-August-2008, and the launch and separation was reported as successful. Previously, the company has needed up to a year to verify and deploy its 4G satellites. (You can read extremely close coverage of the launch at a Web site devoted to space enthusiasm.)
However, the dirty little secret about Inmarsat’s BGAN is that it costs a fortune to heft bandwidth across it. Thus, in-flight broadband over BGAN, if it’s ever available, is going to be changed on an extremely high per-MB rate. None of the providers want to say this. This is in contrast to Row 44 (and, once, Connexion by Boeing), which relies on leased Ku-band transponders where they can fix costs and they require high volumes to keep per-bit costs efffectively low.
OnAir’s launch of calling on Air France’s service involves paying a few euros per minute for calls, which might help you understand what data costs could ultimately run.
Posted by Glennf at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
Think-tank wonders whether banning in-flight VoIP constitutes a violation of FCC rules about blocking services: The Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Barbara Espin uses the ban on in-flight VoIP by American Airlines (facilitated by provider Aircell) to make a broader argument about what she calls the FCC’s “ad hoc approach to broadband network management issues.” It’s clever. American discloses that calling isn’t allowed, and VoIP isn’t even technically within the FAA or FCC’s purview, as far as I can determine. The FAA could choose to regulate it as a safety issue. PFF generally tilts anti-regulation, and has as what it calls its “supporters” a broad area of multiple system cable operators and telecom firms, including Comcast, which was singled out and fined by the FCC for its undisclosed network disruption of P2P connections.
Espin references Joe Sharkey’s excellent column on in-flight calling in Sunday’s New York Times: Sharkey, a veteran travel writer, who survived a mid-air collision over the Brazilian Amazon a few years ago, looks at varying attitudes about calls made during flights. He quotes Aircell’s Jack Blumenstein saying what I’ve telling folks for months: Aircell has a lot of techniques to block VoIP calls already, and “as we identify new ways that people are trying to do voice calls on the airplane, we just kind of zero in and knock those off.” Many geeks have assumed Aircell is a bunch of unsavvy folks who wouldn’t be able to figure out how to disrupt their clever workarounds for making VoIP. (I keep noting that introducing jitter for suspicious data connections wouldn’t disrupt legitimate applications, but would destroy VoIP call quality.)
Posted by Glennf at 9:50 AM | Comments (0)
Aircell has snagged our neighbor (neighbour?) to the north, adding Air Canada to its signed-up airlines for in-flight broadband: Aircell will bring Gogo Internet to Air Canada starting in spring 2009 for trans-border flights using its existing U.S. air-to-ground network. Aircell told me some time ago that they ultimately expected approval from Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean authorities to use the same frequencies as they purchased in the U.S. for air-to-ground broadband; the same had been true for AirFone and other defunct in-flight call providers. The first planes covered will be Airbus A319s.
Posted by Glennf at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
Welcome back, mile-high Wi-Fi: American Airlines has turned on Internet service in its fleet of 15 767-200s today. These aircraft ply routes between New York’s JFK and three cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami. Service is $13 per flight, and bandwidth is expected to be 1.5 Mbps (uncompressed) upstream and downstream, although the service provider, Aircell, claims some advantages above that.
This is a big day for Aircell, which spent tens of millions to acquire the exclusive spectrum license that allows them to shoot Mbps to and from planes. My big question will be whether coverage remains seamless across an entire flight—how often one has to reconnect their VPN would be a big issue. If Aircell has architected the network correctly, passengers should never be reassigned an IP address, and connections shouldn’t be dropped even if there’s a hiccup in air-to-ground communication.
I chatted via Skype—text only, thank you—with Aircell CEO Jack Blumenstein this morning who is quite literally walking on air on an American flight. Blumenstein said it’s remarkable even to him to be communicating with other airborne people across “a veritable airforce of AA planes spread out across the skies.” Aircell has been working towards this in one form or another for many, many years. And now they get bragging rights at being first, even if it’s a pilot project.
I’ve covered in-flight broadband for several years, and I’ve been wondering lately whether we’d be waiting until 2009 to see real production service. American is calling this a 3-to-6 month pilot to see what their passengers think. Just yesterday, I wrote up veteran travel writer Joe Brancatelli’s frustration with the lack of information and some misinformation about in-flight broadband.
You can read more background on American’s plans and Aircell’s technology in a post I wrote for BoingBoing on 24-June-2008.
Suzanne Marta of the Dallas Morning News was liveblogging this morning from a flight to Los Angeles, as was Peter Ha at Crunchgear, who measured 1.7 Mbps downstream. Ha’s broadband test relies on having no other active users on a network slowing down the test, so the real speeds up and down could be much higher.
Posted by Glennf at 8:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Joe Brancatelli pokes beneath the surface of claims that in-flight Internet is imminent: I’ve covered some of the same ground, but veteran travel writer Brancatelli connected the dots by checking with the FAA to find the status of applications for aircraft certification by Aircell and others.
He’s not very positive about it, because his research shows a mismatch between claims and work. He writes that an unnamed American airline executive is frustrated by the delay in launching the 3-to-6 month pilot on their trans-continental fleet; that Aircell hasn’t submitted paperwork for Virgin’s Airbus models for certification; and that the FAA just received a request to certify Delta’s MD-80 craft, which makes a launch with 75 planes this year on that airline less likely.
Competitor Row 44 doesn’t fare better in his analysis, as they promised spring and summer 2008 tests that still haven’t happened, with Southwest and Alaska Airlines.
I’m a little more positive about the future of in-flight broadband. There’s no particular conspiracy. It’s hard to make it work. Development and testing is tricky due to FAA limits, and getting in-flight handoffs to work for seamless service at 35,000 feet is far more difficult than, say, cellular handoffs in a moving car at 100 feet above sea level. My suspicion is that tuning the service to be entirely reliable at launch is what’s taking so long.
Brancatelli blames the high price of Connexion on its failure, but I don’t think the $27 fee for long-haul flights deterred users. Lufthansa, which deployed all its long-haul fleet, apparently had very good usage. Most other airlines had few craft equipped, which didn’t allow business travelers, able to expense several hours of work for a $27 fee, the reliability of having on-board Internet when they needed it. Connexion also had many reports of spotty service in certain areas.
Connexion’s failure came from deploying technology that was old when it was deployed, which weighed too much, and which was too expensive to install. Connexion’s revenue and expenses were forecast based on having several hundred aircraft with Connexion service—recall that it was supposed to be a domestic U.S. service, too. In the end they had about 100, I believe.
Brancatelli is also modest when he says Boeing “lost” $300m. That’s part of what they wrote down. My sources say they spent more than a billion in R&D, transponder leases, ground station operation, airline incentives, and payoffs at the end.
Posted by Glennf at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)
Delta Airlines says they’ll put Internet access on every plane: Delta is the first major U.S. airline to take the full-on plunge into fleet in-flight broadband service. The company said that it will equip 330 planes by 2009, starting with 130 MD craft this year, with Aircell’s service. The Gogo Internet offering costs $10 for flights up to 3 hours and $13 for longer flights.
Delta’s competitors with broadband interest, like Alaska, Southwest, and American, each have a different plan of attack. Alaska will test service soon with Row 44, which uses Ku-band satellite access, albeit with higher speeds and far lower costs, the company says, than Boeing’s doomed Connexion service. Row 44 touts their over-water ability, critical for Alaska, which flies plenty of routes to the great northern state and to Mexico. A test is what’s scheduled; not deployment.
Southwest did some deal with Row 44, but nothing further has been forthcoming. Summer’s almost over, and we haven’t heard more about the “four aircraft” mentioned in the linked press release.
American has the most fully formed plan, but they, too, are testing Aircell’s service, and will shortly launch service on 15 trans-continental 767-200s, flying largely routes among SFO, LAX, JFK, and Miami. The company said in the past that they would decide on fleet deployment after the pilot stage.
I shouldn’t forget Virgin America, which planned Internet access as part of a set of already-deployed in-flight networked services, but they have under a couple dozen planes at the moment, so they’re not a real competitor except on a few routes. Their launch date hasn’t been set. Update: Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOm got the detail from Virgin that Wi-Fi is in place for crew on a few planes now, and will be turned on for passengers by year’s end. The full flight will be unwired by Mar. 2009, she writes.
Delta’s announcement makes it clear that air-Fi is coming soon, and will likely change how business travelers plan trips. If you can get productive work done during a flight, that changes the financial equation of the trip’s cost, and your time out of the office. Pair in-flight Wi-Fi with a cell data card, and you may curse the fact that you’re always connected.
Posted by Glennf at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)
A bill is heading to the US House of Representatives to create a legal ban on in-flight calls: The current ban is regulatory, with the FCC disallowing calls using 850 MHz equipment and the FAA not certifying airworthiness for mobile calls (and not having been asked to do such by the industry, as far as I know). But that’s not enough for Congress, and perhaps rightly so.
The HANG UP Act (Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace, cute) will make the regulatory actions statutory. Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio has been pushing such a move to prevent airlines from moving forward on such services despite the overwhelming distaste by American travelers. In Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, there appears to be less concern, and we’ll see how it works out when calling starts to become widely available on RyanAir and other airlines by year’s end.
AirCell’s near-term launch with American Airlines of its GoGo Internet service will use various measures, including crew involvement, to prevent in-flight VoIP.
To enable in-flight calling, OnAir and others place a low-power picocell in an aircraft which handles all the frequencies that could be used by mobile phones. The phones associate with the picocell, keeping their power output low. The picocell could be used to prevent calls entirely, too.
Posted by Glennf at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
I wish I was so high with some guy in the sky: In today’s Mobile Post, I talk about the big event today: American Airlines flying the first commercial flight since Connexion shut down with broadband onboard. It’s a test; it launches commercially in a few weeks. More in the post.
Posted by Glennf at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)
American Airlines will fly its first commercial round-trip with Aircell’s Gogo service active tomorrow: On Wednesday, 25-June-2008, in-flight broadband briefly flickers back to life with a JFK to Los Angeles round-trip flown by American on which passengers will get free use of the onboard, in-flight Internet service via Wi-Fi. The test flight is a kind of soft launch, which will be followed in a few weeks by full-on service.
American will offer Gogo on its 15 Boeing 767-200s, which means all JFK-LAX routes and some JFK-SFO and JFK-MIA (Miami) routes. The test will likely stress the system because more people will get on than on a typical flight since they won’t be paying, and I would guess a lot of people will immediately try streaming video just to see if it works.
The full-on launch is still a pilot project even though it involves so many planes, routes, and passengers.
BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin asked me to participate in an interview call today with execs from Aircell and American Airlines, and I’ve written up the full account for their site.
Among other interesting tidbits I learned today, the onboard systems have 800 GB of capacity for future expansion—streaming media, most likely—and the AA-configured 767-200 has power outlets scattered around coach, and at every seat in first and business class.
Posted by Glennf at 7:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing gets the scoop on when American Airlines launches its in-flight network using Aircell GoGo service: She writes that it might be as early as this week on JFK, LAX, SFO, and MIA flights (that last one is Miami; took me a moment). Virgin is probably still a few months away, although they told Jardin that they’re more prepared, but they have more integration to do.
Jardin notes that Virgin is thinking about what gets cached on planes. I would note that the idea of onboard media and caching servers is a great one, because it means that passengers could ostensibly stream or purchase downloadable digital content; and that whenever an airplane lands, its servers could automatically suck in at 802.11n speeds from a gate-mounted access point all the latest data to cache, including video.
On the cost of fuel to carry the Wi-Fi gear—probably a total of 200 pounds of dead weight and drag, based on information that Aircell and others have been giving out—I may have been close tot the mark when I suggested it was $50 for a cross country flight a few days ago.
The excellent Scott McCartney, author of The Middle Seat column in The Wall Street Journal, ran down the numbers on 10-June, and he says LAX-JFK costs about $500 per passenger when all the costs are figured out. But that includes all fuel divided by average passenger count: that is, the weight of the plane, everything in it, and its drag are all contributors.
That means that an added couple of passengers due to the availability of Wi-Fi; their willingness or the overall willingness to pay slightly more for the flight (which would be even fuller if more people want on); and the airlines’ cut of a dozen or sessions per flight could clearly outweigh the gas cost.
Posted by Glennf at 1:26 PM | Comments (0)
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal uses test version of Aircell Gogo: He finds it works pretty much as the company is promoting it. Most medium-bandwidth activities work well, while video is choppy. The company told him it would prioritize data, so that email and Web connections would work for the most people. There’s nothing new in the article for readers of this site about the technology (modified cell data), cost ($10 for sub-3-hour flights, $13 for longer flights), or speeds. But Mossberg says the service could launch in three American cross-country routes as soon as July, with Virgin following.
Posted by Glennf at 6:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wired writes that airplane-Fi is bursting out all over: I’ll quibble with the writer’s assertion that inflight Internet has been promised “for at least four years now.” It wasn’t promised. It was delivered with Boeing’s Connexion, which turned out to be too expensive, too heavy, too slow (relatively), and timed wrong for the industry. The latest wave hasn’t been promised for very long, unless you count OnAir, which was promising mobile telephony and texting for about four years, but has been hung out to dry by its satellite partner, Inmarsat, which has suffered huge delays in launching its birds for service.
The writer says that air-to-ground service is like Wi-Fi in the sky, but it’s using cellular data standards, and so it’s much more like mobile broadband in the sky. He also writes that there’s 3 Mbps, which is the combined up-and-down estimated throughput of AirCell, the only firm that can operate such service in the U.S. for commercial flights. The next graf mentions that satellite-based Internet access is coupled with, uh, 802.11b (yes, B) access points. I think that’s an error, innit?
And the analysis of JetBlue’s move is incorrect. The purchase of Verizon’s Airfone network is about positioning equipment, not using out-of-date gear that can’t be employed for phone calls on commercial airliners.
I’d suggest a more appropriate metaphor be used than the one in this sentence: “[Lufthansa] hopes the experience is more fruitful than its ill-fated 2004 deal with Boeing’s Connexion service, which crashed and burned when Boeing shut it down two years later.” Beyond the distasteful reference, Connexion was shut down in an orderly fashion, and Lufthansa was one carrier that loved it, and tried to get it to stay in operation, and, failing that, to build a consortium to revive it.
The article finishes with a set of incorrect conclusions:
“There hasn’t been much news about how airlines plan to charge for these services.” In fact, we know pretty much that it will cost roughly $6 an hour, $10 for a 3-hour flight or less, and $13 for a flight longer than 3 hours. That’s from Aircell in various statements, and it appears to be roughly the charges expected from its competitors in the US. In Europe, mobile calls and texting prices are also known: about US$2.50 per minute for calls, and something like 25 to 50 cents for text messages, not much more than the egregious ground pricing.
“If the industry’s cash crunch gets much worse, in-flight broadband might be mothballed before it even gets off the ground.” It’s unclear what part of the expense the airlines are bearing. In my discussions with firms over the last five years, it’s clear to me that this round involves the providers bearing more of the cost—and hence the lower installation cost involved—but also retaining more of the revenue.
Wi-Fi a-go-go onboard buses: The New York Daily News checks in on the trend to put Internet access via Wi-Fi on board East Coast buses. The article notes that Greyhound’s new sidewalk-pickup BoltBus service among corridor cities has provoked the long-running Chinatown buses to bolt on Wi-Fi as well. The Chinatown Bus Association says here that their bus tickets are cheaper and thus more competitive—but one of their members has already added Wi-Fi, and others are considering it. MegaBus also serves the coast and has Internet access, as well as DC2NY. The biggest problem, though? Passengers demand AC outlets, and only BoltBus has them on every bus. LimoLiner (New York to Boston) isn’t mentioned here, but is one of the earliest firms I’m aware of with on-board Internet, starting in 2004, and they also have power to every seat.
Posted by Glennf at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
The LiveTV division of JetBlue will assume Verizon Airfone’s operations, which includes 100 towers with communication gear in the US: While Airfone ceased commercial operations in 2006 following their giving up early in the bidding for plum spectrum won by AirCell, they still have governmental and corporate (“general aviation”) customers. JetBlue’s LiveTV won the smaller of two licenses (1 MHz); AirCell won the 3 MHz auction. AirCell built its own network (an expansion of previous general aviation service), and is launching very shortly with Virgin America and America Airlines.
Ostensibly this purchase allows JetBlue a faster and simpler path into operations. Whether it’s worth it to JetBlue is hard to tell, except that they will likely be marketing this service to other airlines as a differentiator. It will be lower bandwidth than AirCell, but could be likewise cheaper and used for shorter-haul flights.
Verizon notes some of the technical details of their service’s business status on a FAQ for their corporate customers, which has an oddly large amount of business detail. Verizon was obligated within two years of the end of the auction for the spectrum they occupied with their very inefficient narrowband analog service to cease operations on those frequencies. That date is about now (the certification of the auction results was close to two years ago), and Verizon clearly worked out the details to allow current customers to maintain continuity through the spectrum vacation and into JetBlue’s hands on January 1.
As I noted a few days ago, a few sources had already tipped me that JetBlue’s test aircraft with Wi-Fi onboard and email was using the ancient Airfone network, which is capable of slow dial-up modem speeds, rather than using the 1 MHz which could conceivably carry over 500 Kbps of data in each direction per plane.
Posted by Glennf at 9:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
JetBlue’s test plane with onboard Wi-Fi expands to other services’ email offerings: JetBlue is running a trial of in-flight email access on a single plane. Initially, service was limited to Yahoo Mail and BlackBerry mail on Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry phones. Now, the company has expanded to AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Windows Live Mail. Microsoft Exchange access is also being offered, but I’m unclear how the security profile would work there—I’m guessing it’s Exchange Webmail via secured connection. News.com reports that Web surfing is still off limits, but Amazon has a tailored shopping site.
JetBlue won a sliver of air-to-ground spectrum in auctions in 2006 through their LiveTV division. This should allow them to offer low-speed services, including email.
However, a little birdie told me that JetBlue’s test is using the old analog cell network downlinks—that’s right, 1990s technology that provides a trickle of bandwidth. This is what the Tenzing JetDirect service, briefly available before the airline industry collapsed, used for connectivity.
Posted by Glennf at 9:23 AM | Comments (0)
In an interesting move, Silicon Valley’s Mineta San Jose International Airport adds free on top of paid Wi-Fi: The authority decided to put out $90K for equipment and foot a $41K per year bill for service with 15 Mbps backhaul to handle what they believe will be 1,000 daily users. Oddly, T-Mobile and Wayport will also continue to operate for-fee networks that pass along $139K in revenue to the airport. The free service will be advertising supported. Several companies are working with the airport on providing advertising.
Posted by Glennf at 9:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
iPass announces roaming deal with Aircell Gogo in-flight network: Gogo isn’t yet aloft, though it’s well into testing, but iPass has a contract in hand to allow its subscribers broadband access. The press release sidesteps cost, and an iPass spokesperson clarified for me that pricing hasn’t yet been determined; additional fees will be required, but how much isn’t yet set. Given that Aircell has spoken about fees of about $10 to $12 for cross-country flights, iPass can’t include unlimited service at a fixed rate, I wouldn’t think. But many terrestrial venues charge $7 to $12 for 24 hours access and iPass, Boingo, and other retailer partners pay those venues as little as 50 cents per session. (Correction: This item originally stated that iPass wasn’t planning at this time to charge for Gogo service. That was an error: iPass hasn’t yet set the fees, but expects to charge something on top of their flat rate.)
Riverside network should launch soon: I recall a ribbon (or cable) cutting ceremony for AT&T’s MetroFi-built Riverside, Calif., network some time ago, but the full launch beyond a trial network in 2007 appears ready to go by the end of May. The network was originally billed as planning to cover the 80+ sq mi of the city; this article says just 55 will be covered. And AT&T’s local project manager told the audience at a training session, that the service is “mainly meant for outdoor use.” Huh. Service is free with ads at a rate that’s not easily found (512 Kbps?); a premium ad-free service at 1 Mbps is free to AT&T’s 1.5 Mbps or faster DSL subscribers and fiber users, as well as by paying a monthly rate that isn’t yet disclosed. The 24-hour rate is a crazily high $7.99.
Posted by Glennf at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
My former hometown’s paper writes about local politician working on bill to make double sure voice calls can’t be made over the U.S.: Three House Transportation Committee members, including long-time rep Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), are pushing Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace: HANG UP. Cute. Congresscritters are well aware of the vagaries of flight. For most representatives, who are typically not wealthy, it’s routine to travel coach as often as weekly back to the hinterlands for fundraising, constituent services, and family visits. DeFazio et al would like to ensure that the current regulatory situation that prevents in-flight calls would be more fully spelled out as a statutory ban.
Meanwhile, our European cousins are experiencing turbulence in the test of mobile calls on an Air France plane: The New York Times reporter found that calling is sketchy. Outgoing calls took a few tries; incoming didn’t seem to work. Despite OnAir’s promotion that 12 simultaneous calls can be supported under their system, only 6 are in this test configuration (12 will be available later). BlackBerry users couldn’t get email. The cost is about €2-3 per minute, which is a bit higher than the US$2.50 originally estimated.
Posted by Glennf at 8:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
How much can people stand the person talking next to them on a plane? The real question about calling in-flight is whether folks in a packed sardine can over Europe will accept multi-lingual, multi-hour chats. Not the technical or price issues at all. That and more in this audio mobile post
Posted by Glennf at 3:23 PM | Comments (0)
The EC adopted two measures that will allow harmonized licensing, technology across EU states: The EC recommends that member states mutually recognize each other’s licenses granted for in-flight mobile communications, which means that a firm or airline need apply to just one telecom/spectrum regulator to have permission to use the service throughout the EC. The EC’s other measure details the technical requirements for the equipment—picocells—to be used on aircraft so that frequency licensing isn’t in conflict between ground and in-flight operation.
Airworthiness is a separate measure that’s been addressed by the European Aviation Safety Agency across the EU. The EC took this as an opportunity for push for pan-European telecom rules to avoid having to keep defining rules that have to be adopted across all member nations for pan-European services, like this and mobile satellite operation.
The very pro-consumer Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding, who already through force of will backed down European carriers to drop their cross-border roaming rates—later backed up by regulation—suggests that carriers think long and hard about the rates they charge for in-flight service. “However, if consumers receive shock phone bills, the service will not take-off,” she said in an EC press release.
The social factors concerns are left to the airlines, with an implicit threat by the EC to keep on top of it. Reding said, “I also call on airlines and operators to create the right conditions on board aircraft to ensure that those who want to use in-flight communication services do not disturb other passengers.”
The rules today affects phones that can use the 1800 MHz band (GSM 1800), which is estimated to cover phones used by 90 percent of European passengers—or is that 90 percent of travelers on European flights? Hard to know.
The picocells must not simply accept connections for 1800 MHz bands, but also prevent phones using 460 MHz, 900 MHz, and 2100 MHz from communicating with ground stations, which is a simple matter of providing a null carrier that associates with the phone yet provides it no path. No mentioned here is the 1700 MHz and 850 MHz frequencies used by GSM in the U.S., which one would expect would alos need to be blocked, even though quad-band GSM phones include the 1800 MHz band for use. Perhaps through automated selection that’s not an issue.
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Air France starts allowing phone calls in flight: Air France’s single OnAir-equipped A318 has entered its next phase. Passengers can place and receive voice calls during flights. The first three months of this test involved only text messaging and mobile email; this phase will last three months, although earlier, both OnAir (the satellite-backed provider offering the service) and Air France said they’d pull the plug if calling were a problem.
Rates were not disclosed, but have been estimated at about US$2.50 per minute before the recent steep decline in the dollar. Carriers set the price; OnAir sets the wholesale rate.
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United Airlines switches its lounge Wi-Fi to an amenity: Service in the airline’s 27 Red Carpet Clubs and 5 International First Class lounges is now free, still provided by T-Mobile. They join another long-time T-Mobile customer, American Airlines, in going free to lounge members and most other qualified lounge users; it’s $50 for a one-time club pass, which includes free Wi-Fi.
Virgin Blue’s V Australia airline will offer mobile calling, texting with factory-installed system: Boeing will install the Panasonic/Aeromobile system offered under the Panasonic brand eXPhone. All 777-300ERs in the long-haul fleet will feature the option, although some regulatory issues still need to be settled. V Australia service will launch in December between Sydney and Los Angeles.
Jazeera Airways adds OnAir mobile calling, texting: The Kuwait/Dubai airline will upgrade its six Airbus A320 planes; 34 more A320s are on order, which will have the gear installed during manufacture. Service will launch later this year. This article notes a detail I’ve seen elsewhere: up to 12 voice calls can be carried at the same time. That’s using the older Inmarsat system that was supposed to be superceded a couple of years ago by one with eight times the bandwidth. That’s now slated for 2009.
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Aircell’s network of ground stations for in-flight broadband are operational: Now it’s just a matter of flipping switches on the right planes in American Airlines and Virgin America’s fleets. All Virgin American planes and 15 AA planes will have in-flight broadband. Neither firm has set a launch date. Aircell is calling its network “gogo.”
British Airways signs deal with BT for free lounge Wi-Fi: Starting 1-Apr-2008, all 25 British Airways’ lounges will sport free BT Wi-Fi. This isn’t exactly a trend, but more and more premium club areas in airports are just folding in free Wi-Fi as part of the membership fee. Continental fought a long battle with Boston-Logan airport about this (and won); American Airlines started providing free Wi-Fi for its lounge members last December.
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Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator, allows use of phones in the air: Ofcom, in conjunction with other EU nations, will allow the use of mobile phones on UK-registered aircraft. The use of the phones over various airspaces is separately regulated by Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority, the European Aviation Safety Agency, and a variety of national aviation agencies. They will separately issue airworthiness approval. The Ofcom portion of this deals with whether the mobile phones and on-board picocells would interfere with other uses of spectrum. The agency will extend existing airline licenses for 2G purposes, with 3G possible in the future.
Air rage is mentioned in the executive summary of the approval; the issue of passengers getting angry about other people talking (or texting) on phones is left to airlines to manage. The regulator already “requires that airlines have appropriate procedures to deal with disruptive passenger events and further requires that such events are notified through the formal reporting system.” Ofcom is also concerned about the fees charged and that “consumers will receive unexpectedly high bills.” Steps will be taken to make sure callers are informed of the high tariffs, which are expected to run about US$2.50 a minute—but that was in 2007 US dollars.
OnAir, the in-flight operator that’s been waiting for years for this and other rulings, issued a statement that they’ll be proceeding with all due haste to obtain licenses. Their equipment is already EU certified as airworthy.
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Emirates airline says they’re the first commercial airline to allow in-flight calls: An A340 in Emirates fleet is hooked up with Aeromobile’s technology—an on-board picocell—that places calls via satellite backhaul at a hefty rate. The estimate was $2.50 to $3.50 per minute last year, although it depends on the carrier used. Carriers set the ultimate rate; Aeromobile, just the wholesale rate. Text messaging is supported. As with all such systems, flight crew can pull a switch to disable mobile use; and there will be quiet periods, typically at night. Emirates uniquely had existing demand for seat-back phones-Arab News says 7,000 calls per month are made—which makes sense given their demographic. They’ll add GPRS data later in the year.
The BBC article describes Aeromobile’s satellite and picocell kit as “a system which stops mobiles from interfering with a plane’s electronics,” which is mistaken. Rather, a picocell ensures that any potential, not yet seen possibility of out-of-band emissions from mobile devices causing interference would be mitigated, because the picocell allows a cell phone to use the lowest possible signal power.
The system will cost $27m to deploy across the fleet. A second plane, this one a Boeing 777-300, is already retrofitted and will be up and running soon.
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Om Malik reports straight from the CEO’s mouth that Aircell’s in-flight broadband service will be called gogo: Their Web site is live, but watch out for the audio in the Flash intro—I thought someone was pounding on my door. CEO Jack Blumenstein told Malik of GigaOm that service will cost $12.95 for cross-country flights and $9.95 for flights of three hours’ duration or less, commensurate with earlier reports. They’re working with aggregators and corporate resellers, as well as lower-rate plans for handhelds like the iPhone, and frequent flyer flat-rate plans. I expect given their costs and the advantages of loyalty, Aircell could charge as little as $100 per month for unlimited use, and all involved would be happy about this. I would expect real price sensitivity above $100 per month.
Malik gets a few previously unknown technical details out of Blumenstein: the system’s capacity is intended to be 250,000 broadband users; it’s currently operational even though not in use; and they plan to increase their current number of 92 antennas to 500 when fully deployed.
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The latest news from Wi-Fi security vendor AirTight is that airports leak data: The folks at AirTight regularly suit up, carry Wi-Fi monitoring gear around, and report on how bad people are at securing networks—laughably, often at Wi-Fi and security conferences. Their latest bit of PR has a lot of bad news in it, worth reporting. They found that in testing across 14 U.S., Canadian, and Asian airports, that they found unsecured and WEP-protected networks on 80 percent of the visible non-public networks. They believe that some of those networks are used for logistics and operations. (They wisely didn’t probe too far; they could have wound up in the pokey in some states and countries.) They scanned 478 access points.
They also found that 10 percent of the laptops they scanned—out of a total of 585 Wi-Fi clients—had an ad-hoc network in place. That’s the “Free Wi-Fi” network you see whenever you’re in public, which is spread by people connecting to the network, which is then advertised to other people. While the network itself may just be an artifact of Windows XP’s damaged ideas about how to advertise network availability, connecting to another laptop via an ad hoc method creates the potential that any viruses you or they have will be shared.
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Denver airport offers downloadable movies over local network: FreeFi, which is handling the advertising-supported free service in the airport, which jumped from 600 connections a day when it was for-fee to 4,000 to 5,000 at no cost. FreeFi has a deal with Walt Disney Studios to offer digital movie rentals over the local network. I have been writing for years about the power of the edge network, where instead of providing an Internet feed, media resides locally and can be moved at many times the potential Internet rate. This is the first substantial deployment in any form that I’m aware of.
You can move gigabits for free over a local network, and even at 802.11g speeds, a movie could download in perhaps 7 to 12 minutes (1 to 2 GB), especially in a well-designed network with a strong Ethernet backbone; FreeFi said a two-hour film should take 8 minutes to download on an uncongested network with a modern laptop. Move to 802.11n, and we’re talking Stars Wars: Episode IV in perhaps 2 minutes. (I’ve been expecting Apple to offer this sort of service for a while: download locally, with a requirement to authorize the film over the Net. Their new rental model requires authorization, so we might see something from them in the future.)
FreeFi told me by phone this afternoon that films will have a 48-hour rental period from download, and cost $5 to $8. The longer-than-24-hour window is a welcome relief especially for those traveling, but there’s apparently a premium: most online movie rental services charge $3 to $6, and offer a 24-hour window within 30 days after download. For travelers, this will be fine: You’ll download the film out of a need for something to do on the plane or during layovers or delays, or to have something to watch on arrival at a hotel.
The FreeFi representative said the intent was to expand offerings beyond the roughly 60 that are now available. The focus will be on airports, where there are plenty of the right kind of audience passing through. The downloads require Windows Media Player and use Microsoft’s digital rights management, FreeFi told me; sorry, new MacBook Air owners.
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Orbitz’s business service arm asked 640 business travelers about their interest in sky-hi Wi-Fi: The results are lackluster, but there’s an important proviso. Orbitz found that only 8 percent of those surveyed thought Wi-Fi was important enough to take a “less convenient or more expensive” flight, while 56 percent didn’t think Internet access was a necessity, and 36 percent said they’d look for a Wi-Fi-equipped flight but apparently not work hard for it.
But that’s before virtually any domestic business traveler has used in-flight broadband. My expectation is that as service becomes available, people start relying on it, just as they do with a cell phone. Few business people needed to make a call away from a landline or phone booth before cells were common and reliable, too.
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Finally, airborne Wi-Fi is getting some legs with Southwest announcement: In the wake of a series of announcements and leaks last year, and today’s formal plan by American Airlines to put AirCell service in all 15 of its domestic 767-200s, we’re starting to see traction. Southwest will work with Row 44 to test in-flight broadband by this summer. Row 44 uses Ku-band satellites, the same as doomed Connexion by Boeing, but the company (and other similar operators not yet launched) argue that with modern antennas, more strategic transponder rental, and better signal processing, they can achieve far faster results than Boeing at a far lower cost.
With Row 44 and AirCell set for near-term tests, JetBlue in an active trial, and OnAir finally launched in Europe with a single Air France aircraft (but loads of RyanAir planes to come), there’s at last some momentum. What could scotch the momentum is if service turns out to be erratic, if passengers don’t like the offering, or costs turn out higher to equip planes.
None of those issues seems likely to come into play. The satellite operators are using well-known technology, and AirCell has been operating ground-station based telecom for general (private) aviation for many years. The cost for equipping planes is also well understood at this point.
Passengers didn’t flock to Connexion, and some argue that was because of its high cost (over $25 for the longest flights), but I think it was more likely that Boeing was on the rising curve of people carrying laptops with decent battery life with Wi-Fi chips that didn’t suck power too rapidly (the Intel Core processors hadn’t hit when Connexion was in its heydey), and there were enormously fewer handhelds with Wi-Fi. The iPhone, with 4m sold to date, changes the equation of what people will want to do in the air.
Now, interestingly, there’s room for a great partnership between Apple and all these various airline services. Why? Because Apple is now renting movies, which require an Internet connection to start watching after download. A colleague found that on his trip back from Macworld Expo, he couldn’t watch the movies he’d downloaded before taking off because he didn’t have a live connection in the air for the several thousand bytes needed to perform activation. Apple could partner with airlines and services to allow customers to activate rental movies in the air without paying for a connection. This would work even with JetBlue’s limited bandwidth.
Apple could also put cached movies in on-board servers—say the most popular 300 films—so that people could download the movies over the local network at 802.11g or 802.11n speeds (a few minutes) when boarding or in transit. That’s a longer-term project, but it’s something I’ve heard discussed for years now: media servers for cafes, hotels, trains, planes, and other venues.
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American Airlines provides Wall Street Journal with better sense of time, cost of upcoming in-flight Internet access: As previously was known, American will launch service on its 767-200 aircraft, but the plan is clearer that service will start this summer and expand across its fleet. Sounds like testing is going well. The service’s rough price has been set at $10 for some time; this article clarifies two aspects to that. First, flights of over three hours will cost $12.95; shorter flights, $10. Second, that American doesn’t quite expect to make money from the service, but views it as an amenity to “improve our customers’ experience,” which is marketing-speak for “poach customers.” Update: The Journal article is more optimistic than American’s press release, which says they’re still testing and considering whether to expand to their entire fleet.
AirCell will operate the service, as I’ve written about extensively for what seems like years, using ground-to-air technology.
JetBlue is testing service on its own aircraft from ground station; Row 44 will test its satellite service with Alaska Air.
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