Qantas in-flight email and SMS at sky high prices?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 25 March 2008 16:51

Opinion and Analysis

According to a blog post at the US ZDNet site, a whole swag of US airlines will be introducing broadband in-flight this year.

They include Alaska Air, American Airlines, Continental, JetBlue, Southwest and Virgin America, because of the new ‘Open Skies’ rules which are introducing more competition in the US.

ZDNet notes that American Airlines and Virgin America will offer Aircell GoGo’s service, which runs on the EV-DO Rev A network (a version of which Telstra is about to switch off in Australia), and by using caching and compression will offer up to 2Mbps speeds to passengers, with 15 Boeing 767s due to be outfitted by the US spring – available through your laptop or via the screen on the back of your seat, at the very cheap US $12.95 for long flights and $9.95 for short flights pricing.

JetBlue has one Airbus A320 that lets you use your Blackberry Curve 8820 or 8320 with Wi-Fi to access corporate mail, Yahoo Mail or Yahoo messenger.

Row 44 is another in-flight Internet provider that uses satellites – as did the defunct Boeing Connextion – which should already be in operation on some Alaska Airlines flights, with other North American routes set to get the service, although it theoretically can work worldwide.

Southwest Airlines is set to trial the service on four Boeing 737s in the US summer.

All of this means we should get broadband in Australian skies eventually, but likely not before Qantas has recouped the cost of AeroMobile’s ghastly GPRS service first.

The US gets the fast and friendly skies, Australia gets, sigh, the slow skies. Thanks, Qantas!