The Hindu : National : Surf while you fly

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 14, 2004

National

National

Surf while you fly

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, APRIL 13. A few weeks from now, you can surf while you fly. Two international carriers flying to India — Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines — are expected to be among the world's first to provide passengers with broadband Internet services in the air.

Lufthansa is likely, starting end of April or early May, to offer the service progressively on all its long haul routes. It is reported to have begun refits to over 80 of its aircraft for the purpose.

While no official announcement has been made, the aviation trade media has been second guessing the German airline all last week and even suggested that the inaugural "connected" flight will be on the Munich-Los Angeles sector. This will obviously be of interest to its Indian customers since Lufthansa has just announced a new link from New Delhi to Munich.

Singapore's national carrier is reported to be fitting the broadband equipment on 40 of its planes for an August launch. The Taiwan-based China Airlines is also likely to follow suit — and both are known to be talking to the Singapore-based Internet Service Provider, Star Hub, for the connectivity. Japan Airlines and Scandinavian Airlines are also planning a 2004 launch of Internet in the Air. And since Wi-Fi wireless Net technology will be used inside the aircraft cabin to provide the service to passengers with own laptop computers, it is already being called Sky-Fi.

All these airlines have joined with Connexion, a business group of the aircraft maker, Boeing, which has perfected the technology.

In fact, Connexion will provide the Internet service on all these partner airlines, fitting the necessary hardware and tying up with local service providers in different countries. Passengers can surf the web, exchange e-mail, including multimedia files, at a fixed cost per flight of between $20 and $30 — depending on whether the flying time is up to six hours or more.

A limited pay-by-each-e-mail service is already being offered on Cathay Pacific and on United Airlines' U.S.-based flights, by a U.S.-based company, Tenzing Communications, which uses the existing voice networks that connect the plane to the ground. But the Boeing/Connexion service will be the first airborne full-fledged high-speed Internet service backed by its own satellite system to link up with a terrestrial service provider. The technology challenge is formidable, since international flights will have to seamlessly link and de-link with different ground-based networks as they fly across continents.

Since airlines don't want to run too many wires inside the plane, they are expected to go the Wi-Fi route — but the Connexion technology provides the option of a wired system, where passengers can plug in their computers, much like they now plug in their headsets.

Most business flyers today are known to carry laptops — and airlines are betting that the overwhelming majority will pay a little bit extra to remain connected during flights of 3 hours or more. Till today all you could do on long international flights, was to read, listen to music, watch the in-flight movie — or sleep.

Now, you have yet another option: of surfing the World Wide Web, even as you straddle it from above.

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