Alaska Airlines will have Internet access on its airplanes, starting as soon as March. The airline said today that it would use Aircell, a firm that has about 730 aircraft aloft that are enabled with in-flight Internet from six airlines. The service is marketed as Gogo Inflight Internet.
Alaska had previously tested and made a tentative commitment to Row 44, a competing in-flight service provider. However, Row 44, which still has Southwest Airlines’ backing, has only a few test planes equipped with its service. Aircell uses air-to-ground cellular-style Internet access, while Row 44 relies on satellites.
Steve Jarvis, an Alaska vice president, said that Alaska needed to choose a way that would “get us up and running.” Aircell will have the airline ramped up fast, with a much quicker installation process for the Internet gear. Jarvis said that with a lot of domestic carriers already having Internet service on board, it was important to “very quickly deploy a system.” He said that through testing, “we learned customers really want this service.”
Jarvis said Alaska will follow Aircell’s standard pricing, which runs from $5 for a short flight up to $13 for a long flight. You can also pay $30 for a 30-day single-airline unlimited usage pass, or $13 for a 24-hour pass on a single airline. A mobile device, like an iPhone, can get online for $8. The monthly subscriber pass could ensure customer loyalty: if you pay $30, you might preferentially book Alaska even at a slightly higher fee to have Internet access at all or without paying for it again on another airline.
Alaska and Southwest were both coy about whether Wi-Fi would be a for-fee service, or a free amenity. Southwest still seems to be on the fence. “The drop in usage when you go from free to a session-based service is substantial,” Jarvis said, but it’s clearly what the airline needs to make the service work for its bottom line.
Jarvis did say that the airline was “interested in sponsorships just like you’ve seen with other carriers.” Google sponsored two months of free Wi-Fi on Virgin America from November 2009 to January 2010, while Lexus gave a week of free Gogo service in November on all American Airlines planes equipped with service.
The first routes to get covered will be those on which Alaska flies its 737-800 fleet, mostly transcontinental. But Jarvis said its “nerd bird” flights from Seattle to San Jose and Austin would also have “a lot of really high-tech early adopting customers.” One could expect those routes might see the next wave of Wi-Fi.
Jarvis said that the company would like to have the 737-800 fleet done before summer, and its entire fleet ready with service this year. Airlines must get FCC airworthiness certification for using Wi-Fi on each model of plane; Alaska flies four Boeing 737 variants. (The airworthiness test is required to make sure there’s no unintentional interference between airplane electronics–avionics–used to fly the plane and anything added to a plane’s systems.)
Alaska will join a bunch of other airlines with different commitments to in-flight service. Delta tops the bill with about 350 planes “unwired,” and another 175 or so committed between the original Delta and acquired Northwest fleets.
American has a commitment to put service on about 300 planes in total–I believe it’s approaching halfway–while Virgin America and AirTran have installed service on all their planes, although they have small fleets. (I recently used Gogo on Virgin and wrote it up for my Wi-Fi blog.)
Gogo is also on a handful of Air Canada planes that travel into the U.S., while over the U.S.; the United p.s. routes (its transcontinental 757-200 fleet); and will appear on US Airways sometimes this year on “select A321 aircraft.”
Aircell and Row 44 use different means of relaying Internet connectivity to a plane. Aircell won the rights to former in-flight phone spectrum used to make those expensive air-to-ground calls that eventually no one used.
Aircell has put in place hundreds of cellular base stations on towers, pointing the antennas up at sectors of the sky. The company uses nearly off-the-shelf technology for communication, just like that employed on Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel’s network (CDMA-based EVDO Rev. A, for the geeky). The plane-to-ground signals are then fed into an onboard set of Wi-Fi base stations; only Wi-Fi is needed to use the Aircell system.
With the current setup, Aircell can deliver a couple Mbps to a plane, but each user might see just a few hundred Kbps. With a future update to fourth-generation mobile broadband–LTE, if you must know–Aircell might be able to double to quadruple bandwidth.
Row 44 opted for satellite-backed service. Using leased transponders on geostationary satellites–ones that stay in one position over the equator–Row 44 can reach over-land and over-water routes. Row 44 gave out different numbers about what it could deliver to planes, but it’s clearly on the order of several to a couple dozen Mbps.
While Aircell’s system can point a bit out over the ocean for flights that hug the US coast, routes that really go out over the Pacific or Atlantic are out of reach except by satellite.
And you’d think that might be a problem, given that Alaska flies from Seattle and other cities to Alaska and coastal Mexican cities. Alaska’s Jarvis said that most usage for the service in testing is by business travelers, and that the Mexico and Hawaii routes are–not surprisingly–”really not business travel routes.”
Still, Aircell has agreed to install in Alaska and beef up service along routes to Alaska. Aircell has a partnership with a Canadian firm that will have access to the same spectrum Aircell uses in the United States, but the process of finalizing use of that spectrum is still ongoing. That could be critical in providing service for most or all of an Alaska route.
If you are wonky like me and recall Boeing’s Connexion service, which was shut down in 2006 after a long delay in launch, Boeing also chose to use satellites to deliver Internet service. There were many reasons given for its failure, but the post-9/11 airline environment was one cause (originally, Connexion had contracts in hand to have the pre-2001 highly profitable domestic US airlines install the service), and the company’s technology was out of date by the time it finally got installed on planes in 2004.
Aircell, by contrast, seems to deliver precisely what airlines and customers are asking for: no-fuss, in-flight service that doesn’t weigh down planes or wallets. I’d prefer if the Wi-Fi were free, but in an era in which we’re paying for checked bags on super-cheap flights, I don’t mind paying a few dollars when I have work to be done.
