Lufthansa to give wing to broadband (geek alert!)

Broadband access will be the latest in-flight service for travelers on Lufthansa, coming after an agreement struck by the German airline and a Boeing subsidiary devoted to mobile communications. Lufthansa and Connexion by Boeing announced Monday that after the recent completion of trials for broadband access on Lufthansa flights, the airline will make the service available starting in 2004 on its fleet of about 80 long-haul aircraft, including Boeing 747-400 and Airbus A330 and A340 planes. Financial terms of the service agreement were not disclosed.

The broadband service will let passengers access the Internet and e-mail, and connect to corporate networks on their own computers, either wirelessly, using 802.11b networks, or via Ethernet connections built into the seats. Connexion by Boeing also finished a trial with British Airways, while Japan Airlines and Scandinavian Airlines System have announced their intent to install the service on their long-range planes.

Lufthansa and Connexion are still working out the fees to be charged for the service, but according to data from the trial earlier this year, passengers were willing to pay up to $35 for the service on a 7 hour to 8 hour flight, according to Sean Griffin, a spokesman for Connexion.

"One of the things we discovered is that the value of the service depends on the length of the flight," Griffin said. Lufthansa is also looking into allowing frequent customers to use their air miles to pay for service.

Lufthansa spokesman Tom Tripp said that a portal with information, such as updated news headlines, would be available for free.

Connexion's Griffin said U.S. carriers have been reluctant to sign up for any additional services as many are simply fighting for their survival.

"Our initial plan was to roll out to U.S. carriers first and then go international, but after Sept. 11 that wasn't going to work. They're all in a recovery mode," Griffin said.

Although Griffin wouldn't say how much it cost to install the service, he said it was a modest fee.

Long-haul planes average two flights a day and can run up to 7 days a week, according to Lufthansa's Tripp. Preliminary results from the trial indicated that between 50 and 80 passengers used the service. A plane can seat up to 250 passengers. Tripp said that $35 was "in the ballpark" of the fee that the airline was considering. Multiplying $35 by 80 passengers, and the number of flights a plane takes per day by 365 days, comes to roughly $2 million in revenue that a plane can bring from the service.

Bravo to Lufthansa!

Now if they'd only address the knees-against-the-seat-in-front-of-you legroom issue that's kept me off their planes whenever possible...

The price of their new airborne WiFi service seems steep until you compare it to the cost of the feeble dialup connection you get from those stupid useless handsets most flights have nowadays.

Lufthansa's action speaks to a universally forgotten business truism: the way to prosper in an overall market contraction is to grab share from the other guys. This would get me to switch airlines. That is, if I could only fit my poor knees into the crevice between rows.

We are entering the golden age of wireless. My latest laptop, an IBM ThinkPad T40 (actually a T40p, the "workstation-class" unit) has integrated 802.11a/b WiFi that runs like a hose. Thanks to the new Intel Pentium M processor (the core of Intel's Centrino initiative), the 1.6 GHz machine runs as fast as a 2.4GHz Pentium 4--and that's pretty darn fast!--yet weighs less than five pounds and gets seven hour battery life. Amazing machine, and impressively solid. I'm doing some software work today and am astonished at its responsiveness and solidity. A disk- and processor-intensive statistical analysis that took my old Pentium III laptop about ten seconds to finish completes in about one second! Combine this breakthrough battery life with airborne WiFi, and road warriors like me can truly get a day's deskwork done on a flight across time zones.

Increased battery life and WiFi... IMHO these will drive the next tech surge.

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