Other Carriers Plan Expanded Service... But You'll Have To Pay

Passengers on low-cost airline JetBlue will soon be able to check email and surf the web while flying across the country. American Airlines and Virgin America plan to offer their own services within the year, reports The New York Times... and more carriers will likely add inflight web access over the next few years.

JetBlue will unveil the service on one of its planes Tuesday, reports The New York Times. American, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer web access on several of their aircraft in the near future, at a price of around $10 per flight -- whereas JetBlue's service will be free for now.

Wireless access will only be available while in cruise flight. The service will be disabled during takeoff and landing.

“I think 2008 is the year when we will finally start to see in-flight Internet access become available,” said Forrester Research analyst Henry Harteveldt, “but I suspect the rollout domestically will take place in a very measured way.

“In a few years time,” he added, “if you get on a flight that doesn’t have Internet access, it will be like walking into a hotel room that doesn’t have TV.”

If a trial run last week by JetBlue is any indication, however, passengers may find inflight surfing isn't quite all it's cracked up to be... at least not yet.

Due to inherent lags in communication with ground-based stations -- after all, the newfound Internet cafes will be traveling 500 miles per hour -- and the possibility of dropped connections, web surfers will experience loading times not seen since the days of dial-up service on the ground.

"Sometimes you just have to put things out there and see what happens when people try to use it,” said Nate Quigley, chief executive of LiveTV, the JetBlue subsidiary responsible for the airline’s Internet service and current in-flight entertainment system. “We’ll find the bugs and eventually get them worked out.”

That's one of the reasons JetBlue isn't charging passengers. “Why charge for something that doesn’t work very well yet?” said JetBlue founder and chairman David G. Neeleman.

Other airlines planning to charge for inflight access will offer more bandwidth and higher-speed connections, thus justifying the charges. JetBlue, by comparison, will only offer email access, and limited web surfing.

In theory, the technology also allows Internet telephone access... but that's a capability almost universally panned by airlines and passengers alike, due to privacy and noise concerns.

FMI: www.jetblue.com, www.aa.com, www.alaskaair.com