In-flight Internet: The Full Story

Next Tuesday, Jet Blue launches its first flight with free wireless Internet access — sort of. Very sort of.

A story in today’s New York Times, the most popular on the newspaper’s site today, reads: “JetBlue Airways will begin offering a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one of its planes, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer broader Web access in coming months, probably at a cost around $10 a flight.”

Anyone getting on board that experimental Jet Blue flight (from JFK to SFO) expecting “free email and instant messaging” will be very disappointed, however, unless they happen to use Yahoo email and Yahoo Messenger, or a Blackberry. What the Times story doesn’t tell you is that these are the only services that can be used, since bandwidth is so limited, and since Jet Blue has only partnered with Yahoo and Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry.

For a cross-country traveler who uses GMail, AIM and a Treo, say, the Jet Blue service is worse than useless. (Though he may get his own back when his Yahoo-using, Crackberry-owning seat buddy suffers a dropped connection, which is said to be still a problem with the Jet Blue service.)

It’s especially ironic considering this statement on the company’s current web page about Wi-Fi access: “JetBlue believes in offering travelers the best value without nickel and diming.”

Jet Blue Founder: Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?

As for the other part of that Times story — the services being launched in 2008 by American, Virgin and Alaska — well, not to brag, but FSB readers know about that already, and in more detail than the Times supplied. In “Wi-Fly“, a story in our recent “Next Little Thing” cover package, we wrote about AirCell, the Denver-based small company supplying Wi-Fi for Virgin and American Airlines (and mentioned Row44, another small business supplying Alaska Airlines’ Internet service).

AirCell’s is a particularly heroic small business story — they stepped into a market abandoned by the mighty Boeing, then had to use all the political connections they could muster to persuade the FCC to auction off a piece of spectrum previously assigned to another business giant, Verizon Wireless. Then they had to raise the money to win the auction. They passed all these tests with flying colors.

Air Cell: Get Ready for Wi-Fly

AirCell’s secret sauce? Its Wi-Fi system is lighter and smarter than Boeing’s was, using cell towers instead of satellite. (I took a special press-only test flight of Boeing’s Wi-Fi system back in 2004, and remember being frustrated by the limitations: you could only use it above a certain altitude, so it could drop without warning when the plane did, and the system took half an hour to start up.)

In other words, it’s another great example of a small, nimble startup with better ideas running rings around an establishment dinosaur. Like I’ve been saying, we’ll see a lot more of this as the 21st century progresses.