If in-flight movies and peanuts aren’t enough to entertain you while flying, how about 2Meg broadband?  That’s the offer Aircell are making with their gogo in-flight WiFi service, which is currently being installed onto multiple planes from American Airlines’ and Virgin America’s fleets.  Rather than satellite connections, the system uses a network of high-powered base-stations, currently numbering 92, that exchange signals with small antennas on each plane.  A customised version of Qualcomm’s EV-DO Rev.A can apparently communicate at up to 3 megabits per second, with gogo promising the equivalent of 2 megabit per second broadband for users thanks to a combination of compression and onboard caching.  Standard 802.11 WiFi is distributed throughout the aircraft via a number of routers. 

American Airlines are gogo-enabling fifteen of their 767s, with the intention to increase that figure to 500 if early indication are positive; Virgin America, however, are hooking up their entire fleet, with broadband eventually available on the in-flight entertainment system in each seat-back.  Prices have been revealed as $12.95 for cross-country flights (such as San Francisco to New York) or $9.95 for flights lasting three hours or less.  Cheaper tariffs for mobile devices, as well as flat-rate access for frequent fliers, are in the works, as are deals with hotspot aggregators such as iPass, T-Mobile and Boingo, and while Aircell CEO Jack Blumenstein refuses to name names, apparently the company is in talks with other airlines regarding fitting the system.

“We think we have a cost advantage over satellite-based systems as we are using proven technologies that are already in deployment” Jack Blumenstein, President & CEO, Aircell

Aircell are keen to point out that their system can be scaled to accommodate EV-DO Rev.B and even LTE, when those technologies become prevalent, and expect to install around 500 ground-based antennas capable of simultaneously connecting a quarter of a million airborne broadband users.

The gogo system will apparently be available by Spring.