As you know, American Airlines is prepping in-flight WiFi in addition to, uh, anti-missile systems. Good news on the former, pricing is set. Good if $10 WiFi for flights less than three-hours or $12.95 for longer flights excites your fiscal sweet-spot like it does American’s. Rollout will begin this summer on AA’s 767-200 jets before rolling out across its entire fleet.
[Via Engadget]
Although we’d always assumed that Ryanair would be the first to roll out Airbus’ OnAir in-flight calling system, it looks like Air France is going to take the prize — the airline is now rolling out Mobile On-Air 2.5G cell service on select international flights. Passengers on European-route Airbus A318s can now use their phones to send and receive texts, MMS, and email over the system when the new “no mobiles” light is switched off, and voice calling support will be rolled in in the second half of the year-long trial. Phones are used just like on the ground, with a picocell on board the aircraft bouncing signals off a satellite, and billing is handled by customer’s regular carrier, with rates “comparable” to regular international calling. All this, of course, while FAA twiddles its thumbs for the “foreseeable future.” Oh well — at least we’ve got in-flight WiFi to tide us over.
[Via Engadget]
In a welcome first for domestic airlines, JetBlue will be rolling out free in-flight Yahoo IM and email services to passengers packing WiFi-equipped devices, starting aboard its new “BetaBlue” Airbus A320. Once this test-bed passenger jet reaches 10,000 feet, an in-plane network with three in-ceiling access points is activated, allowing most any wireless gadget with a Flash-enabled browser to view specialized versions of either Yahoo Messenger or Mail through a universal landing page. What’s more, owners of certain BlackBerry handsets like the 8820 or Curve 8320 can keep feeding their addictions non-stop thanks to an agreement between JetBlue and RIM.
Bandwidth for these services is provided by LiveTV, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the carrier that provides the entire fleet with select DirecTV and XM radio channels, and which also happens to possess a valuable 1MHz slice of ground-to-air spectrum that it’s deploying for this very purpose (with the help of some 100 existing cell towers around the country). If all goes well in what is admittedly a beta test, more aircraft will receive the WiFi makeover, and more features — such as access to terabytes of locally-stored multimedia content — will be rolled out, along with additional service providers besides Yahoo. Just don’t expect an open pipe any time soon: that sweet little slice of spectrum is not nearly robust enough to handle the heavy Slinging, VoIPing, and Torrenting you all would obviously be doing.
[Via engadget.com]
