These days many travelers are looking for more than just cheap traveloptions, such as cheapairplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, discounttravel deals, and cheap vacation packages. They also want to be able to be productivewhile flying via airline Wi-Fi.
Onboard Internet is gained either by having it beamed up to aplanes belly or side from hundreds of ground towers or bounced off ofsatellites from above. UnfortunatelyInternet speeds in the air are seldom as fast as on the ground and access isoften costly.
U.S. airlines are spending billions to provide better inflight Internet. Each company hasdeveloped slightly different approaches on their Wi-Fi business plans.
If you booked a random domestic flight in July, you wouldhave a 60 percent chance of your flight offering Wi-Fi. Today you are most likely to find Wi-Fi whenflying Virgin America.
Virgin Americas entire fleet of planes is equipped withupgraded air to ground antennas from GoGo. This technology is similar to what is offered by a 3G cell phone. Passengers are unable to stream videos onVirgin flights because the peak download speed is much slower than the averagehome or smartphone connections and it is shared with everyone on the plane.
Gogo readily acknowledges that passengers are expecting moreand more capacity, more and more bandwidth, just like they experience on theground.
While Virgin Americas 100 percent Wi-Fi coverage isimpressive, it is a very small airline, with only about 50 aircraft in itsfleet. Delta Air Lines, with over 5,000flights daily, has about 80 percent Wi-Fi coverage.
Most airlines are offering Wi-Fi speeds that do not satisfytodays user, in part because the bandwidth needed is not perceived to be worththe cost.
If your goal is to fly with a carrier that offers the fastestInternet, you should travel with either United or JetBlue. Ironically JetBlue passengers benefit fromthe fact that this airline was one of the last major American airlines to addWi-Fi to its flights. When JetBlue finallyacknowledged the need for Wi-Fi it adopted a newer technology that can streamvideo and recently signed a deal with Amazon for content.
Uniteds approach to offering Wi-Fi is unique in that it usesthree different Internet providers. Currently it offers the lowest chance of providing Internet on domesticflights. The airline was slow to offerWi-Fi, but recently has been working on outfitting its entire fleet and hasseen the most growth overall.
U.S. airlines offer more on board Wi-Fi than any of theircompetitors in part because America has a large contiguous landmass, whichmakes it ideal for the early ground to air technology offer by Gogos 250towers.
Airlines have approached offering Wi-Fi in differentways. America Airlines was an earlyadopter of Wi-Fi. Delta has constantlyupgraded its systems, and today JetBlue offers the fastest connections. Delta has committed to upgrading 250 of itsplane with Gogos new satellite based system in 2016.
Today the lower percent of passengers on flights using theInternet (about 7 percent) suggests to some that customers are not interestedin paying for on board Internet. Othersbelieve that as future newer, faster systems come online that Americans willprove far more willing to pay for Internet while flying.
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