For many busy people, a long airplane flight is one of the last places in life with guaranteed down time, away from the tentacles of e-mail and requests from the office. That's about to change.
In 2003, several international carriers will begin offering high-speed Internet access via satellite. For now, it's basically a trial run so the airlines can figure out how much people are willing to pay to get online with their own laptops at 35,000 feet.
This toe-dipping comes as several companies stand ready to supercharge airplanes with a range of communications upgrades, such as giving passengers the means to send and receive e-mail and instant messages from their seats.
Connexion's service is expected to debut January 15 on Lufthansa flights from Frankfurt, Germany, to Washington-Dulles. Scandanavian Airlines System (SAS), British Airways and Japan Airlines will try it next.
Lufthansa will offer the service for free for three months; British Airways plans to charge about per flight.
Connexion's service requires installing two antennas on the plane, one to transmit data to satellites and one to receive data. A server and routing system inside the plane relay signals to and from plug-in ports at the seats or wireless networking cards in passengers' laptops.
The service promises speeds comparable to cable modems, with downloads up to 1 megabit per second. Even if everyone on board logged on at once, Scott said, the data transfer rate would not be less than 56 kilobits per second, comparable to dial-up.
Connexion eventually could use voice-over-Internet technology to let passengers make phone calls safely. Mobile phones are banned in flight out of fear they can disrupt navigational systems and wreak havoc with cellular networks on the ground.
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