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American Airlines Starts Testing In-Flight Broadband

via Mashable! by Kristen Nicole on 6/25/08

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American Airlines announced their intent to begin testing in-flight broadband late last year, along with most of the other major airlines that operate in the US. Today we learn from WebProNews that American Airlines is allowing passengers in on the testing phase, beginning with a flight between New York and Los Angeles.

laptop on airplane Testing may expand to flights between New York and San Francisco as well as flights between New York and Miami in the coming weeks. American Airlines has teamed up with Aircell to extend this feature to their passengers, leveraging Aircell's Gogo service. Right now only Boeing 767-200 planes have the benefit of testing broadband connections, but this too may be extended to other planes.

Passengers will be able to perform a limited number of functions using the broadband connection, but it's likely to be enough for the majority of passengers. Video download, instant messaging, email and access to corporate networks will be allowed, and broadband usage will be regulated to a certain extent so that users downloading larger files will not ruin the connection speed for the rest of the passengers.

Considering there's a cost for broadband use (as there's a cost for everything on flights these days), I'd prefer to download the movies before I get on the plane, so I can watch them in-flight. For flights over 3 hours long, the fee will be $12.95, and shorter flights will run you $9.95.

Is it worth it? Yes. For me, at least. It's only a matter of time before airlines start finding ways in which to charge for even more peripherals, and set up a media portal full of branding and more pay-as-you-go features as a result of offering broadband on flights. Hopefully such a portal will come with some

personalized custom options that extend the experience beyond the flight itself.

As Aircell SVP Tom Weigman discussed with Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins on the Mashable Conversations podcast back in March their plans to start servicing with Internet service American Airlines and Virgin America flights across America. Tom goes into great depth on the underlying technology and the roadmap for future deployment.

You can sit in on the conversation between Tom and Mark. The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

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