Virgin America is going to launched in-flight Wi-Fi service on Monday
Now Its not a commercial launch of Wi-Fi service its just a second face of testing called beta testing. Its not just with Wi-Fi, but the first ever air-to-ground video-stream For Beta test. all the passengers will get free Wi-Fi services during a Flight from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Virgin spokeswoman Abby Lunardini, said
Virgin will charge US$9.95 for a flight of three hours or less and $12.95 for longer flights. Internet access won’t be filtered for content or applications, except for the VoIP restriction. It has mechanisms to manage the shared bandwidth to prevent one user from taking it all.
Virgin America has planned in-flight Wi-Fi service because of demand from passengers, especially from business travelers, but whether more airlines commit to permanent commercial services will depend on price and performance. Virgin America’s in-flight Wi-Fi service step will make it different from others and move forward in this competition of airlines.
Virgin claims that
it will be the first airline in the U.S. to deploy in-flight broadband on all its planes. It has some advantages in this mission, since it has only 28 planes and all are new. Virgin America itself only started flights in August 2007. Virgin already uses Wi-Fi on its planes for wireless devices that let flight attendants take food and drink orders, The broadband technology will be added to planes gradually over the following months, There will be multiple aircrafts with the Wi-Fi service before the end of December.
Functional & Technical Information about in-flight Wi-Fi service
1. Aircell will provide Internet access to planes via its own national network of 3G base stations.
2. The connection from the plane to the Internet will be via Evolution-Data Optimization.
3. The base stations are being supplied by ZTE USA.
4. Qualcomm, the pioneer of EV-DO, supplied the onboard modems.
