Tech Suave

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This has been in talks for sometime now, with most major US airlines trying to implement Wi-Fi as soon as possible. Its been dragging for some years now but finally wireless internet is all ready to take off at subsonic speeds and at over 30,000 feet above the earth.

The only place which has no access is an airplane cabin and that space will soon be filled when major airlines will give passengers the chance to do their work while travelling, you can chat, browse, social networking and almost everything except for few applications like Skype and other Voip services.

The major airlines who are going to try the Wi-Fi which provides high broadband speeds are:

Southwest Airlines
Virgin America
Alaska Airlines
American Airlines

JetBlue has already done some initial trails in which passengers could access Yahoo email and chat, Wi-Fi enabled blackberry users were also allowed to get their mails. So now you got Broadband in the airplanes. But what about the pricing? No point wasting time trying to implement this technology if most of the people cannot afford it. The prices are just going to calculated and the official prices should be out later this year, but i heard that Aircell who is providing the service to Virgin America and American Airlines are charging $12.95 for a flight time of over 3 hours and a bit less for lesser hours. Now thats pretty cheap of your going to get speeds of around 1-2 Mbps.

How does this work? Pretty simple. The planes will have the service provider’s antenna on top or below their planes. These antennas will communicate with the Cell towers on the ground or will send data back and forth to a satellite. International flights will require satellite internet service for non-disruption of service while crossing oceans.

Wi-Fi is all set to change the face of airline travel. If all the trials go on smoothly, with the equal number of pros and cons, I can see it becoming a necessary feature in every airline.

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