Saturday, December 15, 2007

I wish... Airlines in India offer Wi-Fi/Broadband Internet access.

Last week, there was news that American Airlines would offer its passengers Wi-Fi/Broadband services in 2008. (Though, it's still a pilot program.) With all the advances in technology, I feel this ought to have happened much earlier.

In any case, I am hopeful the technology will become prevalent soon and is quickly replicated by airlines in India. After all, a notebook without Internet is nothing more than a piece of furniture that is better left in the luggage cabin. Given the intense competition amongst airlines here and with each player trying to go one-up in in-flight entertainment services, this may not be too far-fetched.

5 comments:

Michael Bala said...

Emirates has some flights in certain routes that offer wifi. It is certainly charged at 5$ I think per hr. Apart from this all their flights you can check your public email and send SMS's for a fee.

Nimish V Adani said...

Hi Internetian, I shall look forward to flying by Emirates. Also, 5$ seems quite fair to me.

Jose Felix said...

Not just Emirates. The estimate says that there are about 900+ aircrafts with wifi access :)

Nimish..you may have to fly in Dubai-Sydney , Dubai-New York or Dubai-London sectors to check out the service.

The pain is that its a $1 Million investment per aircraft :(

Nimish V Adani said...

USD 1 million per aircreaft? That's huge. I am sure noone in China has gotten into this.

Jose Felix said...

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/12/21/wired.airlines/index.html

Relatively an old story in CNN about allowing Mobile phones in aircrafts. There is a mention about the cost of making an aircraft into a wifi aircraft. Boeing is one of the player :)