LANs in the Sky: Faster E-Mail, Web at 40,000 Feet

Eight miles high, and 5 hours to kill. Wouldn't it be great if you could exchange e-mail with your earthbound coworkers or customers during long flights? You could call an ISP from a seat-back phone, but at $3 a minute and connection speeds that top out at 10 kbps, Web and e-mail downloads are both pricey and unbearably slow.

Fortunately, faster and cheaper hookups are in the works. I tried one of the first new in-flight Internet systems, from Tenzing Communications, and found it much more usable than the seat-back phone dial-up method. However, it offers only limited, pre-loaded Web browsing, and it doesn't work with AOL, Lotus Notes, or Web-based e-mail (it does support Microsoft Exchange Corporate Web Access). Also, right now it is available on only a handful of airlines.

Here's how it works: On each plane, Tenzing installs a local area network that connects passengers' laptops to an onboard server, which in turn communicates with the ground via radio. LAN connectivity varies among airlines. Cathay Pacific uses USB ports; SAS is trying out an 802.11b wireless network.

Flight Test

I tested the Tenzing service on Air Canada, where it is in trials using a LAN accessible through a 56-kbps modem and phone cord. You connect either by running an application--downloadable before flight from the Web or available on CD on the plane--or by creating a dial-up networking connection.

Once connected, just run your POP3-compliant e-mail program--no setting changes are required. Tenzing recommends that people who leave POP3 e-mail on a server use its Web-based POP3 client to prevent messages from reloading once the plane is back on the ground.

Requests to send and receive e-mail are intercepted by the onboard server, which retrieves the mail from your ISP on the ground--but at the same poky 10-kbps rate of a seat-back phone. Tenzing does not eliminate the wait, but it does make it less annoying.

When you first request your mail, the onboard server advises you to check back in several minutes. During that time it slowly retrieves the mail from your ISP. When you check again, the server transfers the mail to your laptop at the zippier 56-kbps speed. Total download time may be the same, but you're not watching the mail trickle in. In my test on a flight from Los Angeles to Toronto, I sent a message to a cousin in Geneva, Switzerland, and received a response within 15 minutes.

The Tenzing server doesn't automatically retrieve long messages and file attachments (the size limit was 75KB on Air Canada but varies among airlines). Instead, it notifies you of oversize messages, and lets you retrieve them if necessary. Since Tenzing's fees will be based on bandwidth usage, holding off on large files can save both money and time.

Tenzing hadn't finalized its pricing at press time, but it estimates you'll pay $5 to $20 to download up to 500KB of mail (and to send a similar quantity) during a day's travel. The 45 messages that I downloaded totaled 182KB.

Limited Web Access

Even non-Tenzing customers can do some very limited Web browsing--mostly of edited pages from Tenzing's partner sites, cached on the server prior to flight time. (Tenzing does update some news pages during the flight.)

In addition to Cathay Pacific--and the trials on Air Canada and SAS--Tenzing's customers so far include Virgin Atlantic and Singapore Airlines.

Interest in in-flight Internet access could pick up with the expected introduction, in the next year or two, of faster air-to-ground radio communications that would permit real-time Net access. Boeing says it's talking to some 30 carriers about Connexion, a satellite-based broadband service slated for a 2002 commercial-airline rollout. Tenzing says its hardware is easily upgradable when faster radios arrive.

But Forrester Research senior analyst Henry Harteveldt believes that an explosion of fast in-flight Internet access isn't likely anytime soon, given the airline industry's historically cautious attitude toward new technology.

"A few years down the road, in-flight e-mail and Web access and entertainment could be very popular if [those services are] priced right," Harteveldt says. "But it will be a rough year or two as they get things launched."